Central Bank staff to report on bad bosses

Central Bank employees are to be encouraged to spill the beans on their bosses if they fall down on the job through a external whistleblower system.

The bank is seeking outside experts to provide what they call “a case-management system to manage the notification of workplace concerns by existing employees”. It said: “The case management system is intended to foster a culture of ‘speaking up’ among staff and to strengthen the Central Bank’s internal processes where staff wish to raise issues of workplace concern.”

Whoever runs the outsourced system must be available day and night to receive contacts from any of the bank’s 1,400 staff by phone or email and will then liaise with the Internal Audit division of the bank, while protecting the anonymity of the employee.

The system will chart how the concern is handled and, if necessary, escalated, and the whistleblower will be kept advised of what response their revelations receive.

The Central Bank said the move was being taken to comply with the Protected Disclosures Act 2014, which requires the creation of procedures to handle whistleblower concerns, and makes it an offence to penalise a worker who speaks up.

“The Act is intended to provide a robust statutory framework within which workers can raise concerns regarding potential wrongdoing that has come to their attention in the workplace in the knowledge that they can avail of significant protections for doing so,” the bank said.

“The idea is that Central Bank employees can securely raise their concerns to a third party; the third party would then separate the workplace concern from the staff member who has raised it, providing the Central Bank only with the nature of the workplace concern.”

Previously, there has been criticism of the bank’s regulatory roles in the Dirt, Ansbacher and overcharging scandals, and of its inability to see the looming financial crash in 2007. But if there were warnings voiced from within the bank, they were not heard. The Central Bank is also considering setting up an internal whistleblower desk to handle issues raised by employees of other financial institutions regulated by the bank with the same anonymity safeguards.

It recently sought public consultation on the move which would bolster its existing contact point, [e-mail].