Ms Lorraine Heffernan:

Clients regularly express that they have suffered reprisals for making disclosures. When a client comes to us it is often the situation that he or she is aware of a wrongdoing but is afraid to disclose and wants to know the protections. Support for people making disclosures is very important because people want to know how to approach this technical and legal arena.

In terms of reprisals, one thing to be mindful of is that unscrupulous employers will invent things so they can accuse an employee in order to distract from a wrongdoing. Therefore, it is important that we train people so that they know when they receive a disclosure what they are dealing with, how to identify what a protected disclosure is and certainly how to penetrate any inventions that employers might make.