Making sure employees adhere to corporate ethics policies has always been a challenge, and changes mandated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and other rules have raised the stakes for companies.
The biggest hurdles to enforcing global compliance of ethics programs are often rooted in cultural differences. Workers around the world often have widely differing feelings about reporting ethical violations at work.
In many cases, U.S. workers are wary of stepping forward to report ethics violations, according to Patricia Harned, acting president of the Ethics Resource Center in Washington, D.C. A survey by the group found that 44% of all nonmanagement employees don't report misconduct they observe.
The top two reasons for not reporting were "a belief that no corrective action will be taken" and "fear that the report will not be kept confidential."
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Source: The Wall Street Journal, November 9, 2004