Mr. John Devitt:

I thank Senator Higgins. I am happy to take one or two of the questions and I will leave it to my colleagues, who are better placed than I, to talk about compensatory measures. When it comes to good practice, there are a number of resources and a great deal of research has been undertaken on this already, which we can send to the committee. One of the recommendations made in a report published a number of years ago by the Association of Certified Chartered Accountants, ACCA, in the UK was that employers use the information shared with them to address risk and to learn from their employees how they can improve their internal systems of controls, irrespective of whether wrongdoing is found. Too often, employers will consider the complaint, or the disclosure, purely on the basis of whether it meets the standard of a protected disclosure. Employers need to be equipped with the skills and resources they need to use this information as intelligence that can help to enhance internal systems of controls. It is something we have been trying to do through our Integrity at Work programme and we provide feedback to organisations which are members of the programme.

There is also a role for the protected disclosures office. I answered a question from Deputy Jim O'Callaghan about the role of the protected disclosures office in providing feedback to Departments, regulators and prescribed persons on how they can improve their internal controls, irrespective of whether any wrongdoing is found or whether someone meets the tests set out in the prospective disclosures legislation. There is an awful lot of information that is filed away, without being looked at again, that could be used to help improve those procedures.

On the question about protections, in our submission to the Department on the transposition of the directive we called for the extension of protections imposed under the directive to all categories of worker and for equal treatment of those on contracts of service as well as those on contracts for service to be able to avail of civil remedies.