Building and Managing Your Compliance Hotline: A Complete Checklist

Most organizations have a compliance hotline. Far fewer have one that employees trust enough to use. An unused hotline gives an organization false assurance. It checks a box without surfacing the concerns it exists to catch.

A compliance hotline gives employees, stakeholders, and outside parties a way to report concerns without fear of retaliation. The difference between a hotline that is effective and one that is not comes down to how it is built and managed.

This checklist draws on more than a decade of compliance services and education to cover every stage of building and managing a hotline employees are likely to use.

Inside, you will find guidance on:

• Assigning the roles and responsibilities that keep a hotline running, from call intake to report resolution
• The policies your hotline needs for confidentiality, non-retaliation, and documentation
• Setting up operating hours, the ground rule message, and vendor selection before launch
• Keeping the program effective through ongoing monitoring, third-party audits, and employee surveys