Sex scandals. Accounting fraud. It's all showing up on the corporate hotline.

Every year, thousands of Nestlé employees contact the company's hotline to report wrongdoing.

- Lauren Weber, Margot Patrick & Chip Cutter

One of them just brought down its CEO—and pulled back the curtain on an $18 billion industry built on anonymous complaints.

It's an industry operating under the premise that companies run better when workers can safely sound the alarm on everything from bad breath to bribery. The task is often farmed out to third parties with names like SpeakUp, Navex, and EQS.

SpeakUp, based in Amsterdam, helps operate Nestlé's line. In 2024, it handled 3,218 calls and messages with allegations ranging from bullying and harassment to fraud and conflicts of interest at Nestlé and its suppliers. Nestlé says it substantiated 20% of them, and 119 people left their jobs as a result.

"Hotlines are magic," said Raheela Anwar, president and CEO of Group 360 Consulting, a Chicago-based corporate advisory firm. "Because people are willing to tell the truth."

At public companies, they're also required. The post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley financial reforms passed in 2002 mandated that companies have a process for whistleblowers to report potential ethics violations. A 2019 European Union directive does the same. More than 90% of U.S. firms with at least 1,000 employees provide a hotline for workers, according to HR Acuity, a company that helps employers track internal investigations and includes employee hotlines among its offerings.

HR Acuity CEO Deb Muller says companies need to publicize those tools and make sure employees can access them easily: "You want to encourage people to speak up, and not just when things are on fire."

How it works

Most employee complaints are handled the old-fashioned way: People go directly to their manager or to the human resources department with workplace concerns. Hotlines come in when things get trickier. Nearly a quarter of hotline tips are made anonymously, according to an HR Acuity survey of employers this year.