16.01.2025 Protection of whistleblowers

External reports – further provisions of the Whistleblower Protection Act enter into force


On 25 December 2024, the provisions on external reports of the Whistleblower Protection Act came into force. They apply to public authorities. The Act obliges those authorities to introduce procedures for reporting breaches as part of external reports. This mainly concerns the Commissioner for Human Rights, but the list of public authorities with this obligation is very broad and includes, among others, local government units

Receiving reports by public authorities

The external reporting procedure is sperate from internal reports, which follows from the principle that the use of the external procedure by a whistleblower is not conditional on the prior filing of an internal report.

Currently, public authorities are required to receive and verify external reports from whistleblowers, and the process of handling these reports should be included in a separate procedure, accompanied by appropriate templates, such as report form. Each authority decides in what form it will accept reports and whether it will accept anonymous reports.

For example, the Commissioner for Human Rights, who is likely to be the most frequent addressee of external reports, has created a Whistleblowers Taskforce of the Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights, and information and materials on external reports are available at the below link.

External reporting procedure

Upon receipt of a report, the public authority should check whether the report contains information about a breach of the law and whether it relates to an infringement in a field falling within the scope of the authority’s activities. If otherwise, the authority competent to take follow-up action will be determined. If the public authority is competent to consider the report, it should send the whistleblower a confirmation of its receipt within 7 days, and if it is necessary to forward the report to the competent authority, the authority has 14 days, and in exceptional cases 30 days from the date of the report, to do so.

At the request of the whistleblower, the public authority is obliged to issue a certificate of protection under the Whistleblower Protection Act within one month. The certificate can be used by the whistleblower to obtain protection against retaliation, prohibited by the Whistleblower Protection Act.

Supplementing internal reporting procedures

The entry into force of the regulations on external reporting resulted in the establishment and publication, by, among others, the Ombudsman, of the procedures for those reports, including the forms for submitting external reports, entities that had previously implemented internal reporting procedures should now supplement these procedures, e.g. by adding reference to appropriate links. By supplementing the procedure, the entities will fulfil the obligation to include understandable and easily accessible information on external reports in the internal reporting procedure. This obligation arises from Article 25(1)(8) of the Whistleblower Protection Act, which also came into force on 25 December 2024.    

Public disclosures – enhanced opportunities

With the entry into force of the provisions on external reporting, the catalogue of situations when a whistleblower can make a public disclosure, i.e. make a breach of the law public, has also expanded. Legal entities should take this into account when dealing with whistleblowers issues (in particular by properly formulating and implementing internal reporting procedures) due to unpredictable consequences of such disclosure.

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Piotr Kryczek Legal Counsel
TGC Corporate Lawyers
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