Compliance

The GFaI is obligated by the Whistleblower Protection Directive of the European Union ((EU) 2019/1937, (EU) 2020/1503) to ensure better protection for whistleblowers and establish a reporting office where whistleblowers can be protected from professional reprisals. Compliance with legal regulations, internal policies, and ethical principles has always been of great importance to the GFaI. To ensure compliance with these regulations and principles, you can use the whistleblower system to quickly, easily, and, above all, safely and anonymously report hints about possible violations and misconduct to the internal reporting office.

The internal reporting office is managed by Victoria Völker and Sonja Schulz. They will process your report, investigate it, and provide you with appropriate feedback.

If you do not wish to report your hint anonymously, you can also contact them directly in the event of a compliance violation without using the whistleblower portal. Each report will be thoroughly investigated, with the presumption of innocence applying to reported individuals, which can only be lifted after a successful clarification of the situation.

For communication with the internal reporting office, we have introduced the digital whistleblower system "hintcatcher." This ensures that you can report your concerns completely anonymously, not only internally but also from any location. The management and the data protection officer were involved in the introduction. We would like to inform you that in accordance with Section 7 (1) sentence 1 HinSchG, you can generally choose whether an internal or external reporting centre (e.g. Federal Office of Justice) is used. In cases in which effective internal action can be taken against the offence and no reprisals are to be feared, the report should be made to the internal reporting office in accordance with Section 7 (1) sentence 2 HinSchG. If an internally reported violation has not been remedied, a report to an external reporting centre remains unaffected.

Please use the following link for your report:
https://report.hintcatcher.com/1jNJBxTYYvpAdGcrWEmZ/

Through the whistleblower system, you can provide the date and time of the potential violation and attach files. Your received message will then be received by our internal reporting office, and you will be confirmed of the message receipt. You will receive randomly generated access credentials from the whistleblower system for your individual, case-related mailbox to communicate anonymously with our internal reporting office. Within 7 days, you will receive confirmation of the report's receipt. The report will be reviewed, and within 3 months, you will be notified of the results of the investigation and any measures taken.

Depending on the violation and report, measures may include contacting the affected individuals or other parties in the environment. If misconduct is identified, the internal reporting office can provide appropriate guidance.