The age of the whistle-blower

Unlike the array of agencies that monitor corporate performance within expected paradigms, the whistle-blower is an unpredictable entity

Companies around the world have auditors, stock exchanges, boards, regulators, revenue and sundry enforcement authorities to monitor various aspects of their functioning. None of these have done much to prevent fraud — remember Barings, Enron-Arthur Andersen, WorldCom, Kmart, to name some signature global cases from the late nineties and early noughties? The past two decades has seen the emergence of a new type of scrutineer: The whistle-blower, a species India Inc has discovered lately. Can they change the dynamics of corporate governance?

Certainly, the power of the whistle-blower has been acknowledged in the governance structures of the more enlightened corporations. Most