![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
The cross-border impacts of whistleblowing recently have become far more visible and consequential, as evident with the ‘Paradise’ and ‘Panama Papers’ leaks, which exposed tax and other financial wrongdoings of prominent personalities around the world, leading to scandals, resignations and prosecutions. Despite its new prominence, whistleblowing often continues to be seen as a series of ad hoc chance acts. We argue instead that whistleblowing is an increasingly institutionalized regulatory tool that is enabled by an emergent ‘whistleblowing system’, with similarities to other new forms of informal global governance. Whistleblowing can be controversial, and we develop a framework for assessing whether any particular whistleblowing event and the system that enables it are in the public interest. We then apply this analysis to the case of global tax evasion. We conclude that a whistleblowing system can make important contributions to difficult cross-border regulatory challenges such as tax evasion, especially where other governance systems fail.
Acknowledgements
Previous versions of this paper have been presented at the 2016 International Political Science Association Congress, Poznan, Poland; the 2017 International Studies Association annual meeting in Baltimore; and the 2017 International Conference on Public Policy, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Singapore. Comments from participants in those sessions, and from the editor and referees of this journal are gratefully acknowledged, as is research assistance by Sutina Chou.
Notes
2 For the ICC, see <http://www.iccwbo.org/advocacy-codes-and-rules/areas-of-work/corporate-responsibility-and-anti-corruption/whistleblowing/>. The role of TI is discussed further below.
3 See for instance the ISEAL Alliance Codes of Good Practice (<http://www.isealalliance.org/our-work/defining-credibility/codes-of-good-practice>) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 26000 standards on social responsibility (<http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/iso26000.htm>), both of which are standards for private standards and practices.
4 On publicness, see Best and Gheciu (Citation2011).
5 The full name is the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions. The text is at <http://www.oecd.org/daf/anti-bribery/ConvCombatBribery_ENG.pdf>. The Convention calls for ‘companies to provide channels for communication by, and protection of, persons not willing to violate professional standards or ethics under instructions or pressure from hierarchical superiors, as well as for persons willing to report breaches of the law or professional standards or ethics occurring within the company in good faith and on reasonable grounds, and should encourage companies to take appropriate action based on such reporting’. Section XCv, 24–25.
6 <http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=16993#.WCdb__krLmY>. The current policy can be found at <http://www.un.org/en/ethics/protections.html>.
7 Examples include the standards of the ISEAL Alliance, or the ISO 26000 standards for social responsibility.
8 OECD, ‘G20 Anti-Corruption Action Plan: Protection of Whistleblowers.’ Study on Whistleblower Protection Frameworks, Compendium of Best Practices and Guiding Principles for Legislation. OECD, 2011. https://www.oecd.org/g20/topics/anti-corruption/48972967.pdf
9 OECD. ‘G20 Anti-Corruption Action Plan: Protection of Whistleblowers.’ Study on Whistleblower Protection Frameworks, Compendium of Best Practices and Guiding Principles for Legislation. OECD 2011, 5.
10 These arrangements could also more precisely be described as ‘assemblages’ or ‘ecologies’, but for our purposes here the more widely used ‘system’ label is sufficient.
11 Similar types of bringing together of functions in the sequences involved in the implementation of self-regulation have been identified by Porter and Ronit (Citation2015).
12 These three criteria are widely used, sometimes with different labels. These criteria were applied by Porter and Ronit (Citation2010). The criteria highlight a process approach to the public interest, rather than an outcomes approach. For a similar approach see Mattli and Woods (Citation2009).
13 Thomas Franck has pointed to such ‘second order’ rules as important in the legitimacy of international law (Franck Citation1990).
15 See <http://www.whistleblowersblog.org/articles/tax-whistleblowers/>, a rich source of information on tax whistleblowing.
17 See, for instance, the TJN’s evaluation of corruption: <http://www.taxjustice.net/topics/inequality-democracy/corruption/>.
18 The WikiLeaks information on this leak is at <https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Bank_Julius_Baer>. The absence of other major tax information on WikiLeaks can be confirmed by scanning its list of leaks (<https://wikileaks.org/-Leaks-.html>) and by Google searching ‘WikiLeak’ and ‘tax’, which primarily returns information on the Julius Baer leak.
22 The GIJN has many other links. #CumExFiles, a project of Correctiv, another GIJN-related organization, based in Germany, has brought together journalists from 12 European countries to reveal, again on the basis of whistleblowing, how several European countries have been exposed to tax fraud. On Correctiv, see <https://correctiv.org/ueber-uns/>.
29 <https://eic.network/>.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Tony Porter
Tony Porter is Professor in the Department of Political Science, McMaster University. His most recent books, all with Routledge, are Transnational Financial Associations and the Governance of Global Finance: Assembling Power and Wealth (2013), coauthored with Heather McKeen-Edwards, his edited Financial Regulation after the Global Financial Crisis (2014), and Time, Globalization and Human Experience: Interdisciplinary Explorations (2017), coedited with Paul Huebener, Susie O’Brien, Liam Stockdale and Yanqui Rachel Zhou, (2017). Karsten Ronit is Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His most recent books are Global Consumer Organizations (Routledge 2015) and his edited Business and Climate Policy: The Potentials and Pitfalls of Private Voluntary Programs (United Nations University Press, 2012). Email: [email protected]
Karsten Ronit
Karsten Ronit is Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His most recent books are Global Consumer Organizations (Routledge 2015) and his edited Business and Climate Policy: The Potentials and Pitfalls of Private Voluntary Programs (United Nations University Press, 2012). Email: [email protected]