'Textualism' could muzzle employees

digitaledition.baltimoresun.com

1 pointhispanic2 comments

The title is a little bit mis-leading. The last line in the article:

“But the danger is this would give people an incentive to go the SEC rather than to someone in their company. That’s the bad news. Every company wants people to report internally so they can fix things quickly.”

suggests that textualism would result in employees reporting problems/misconduct to the SEC rather than to the company, which I think most companies would consider a less desirable outcome.

Where internal reporting works is when you have a rather large organization and it's some mid-level person in the wrong. Some Multi-Billion-Dollar corporation for example, and some mid-level VP doing something worth reporting. Often they'll have an official part of their legal team that's isolated from any repercussions of the mid-level VP that can deal with them and clean up the situation quietly, which is good for the company and good for the whistleblower, and bad for the mid-level VP.

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