In July 2016, BaFin established a central contact point, which whistleblowers can use to report violations of supervisory provisions (see info box ).Whistleblowers are individuals who have specific knowledge of a company's internal affairs – for example, because they are employed there or are in another contractual or trust relationship with the company. Whistleblowers therefore play an important role in identifying violations of supervisory law. They can make a valuable contribution to uncovering misconduct by individuals or entire companies in the financial sector and to stemming and correcting the negative consequences of such misconduct.

Special protection

The legal basis for establishing the contact point for whistleblowers is section 4d of the German Act Establishing the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (Finanzdienstleistungsaufsichtsgesetz), which was introduced by way of the German First Financial Markets Amendment Act (Erstes Finanzmarktnovellierungsgesetz).

Under this section, the protection of whistleblowers enjoys the highest priority.¹ BaFin has therefore developed a system to give special protection to the identity of whistleblowers and the individuals affected by the reports. As a rule, BaFin will therefore not reveal the identity of whistleblowers to third parties. Employees of supervised companies who turn to the contact point for whistleblowers are not held liable under labour or criminal law. Irrespective of the above, whistleblowers also have the opportunity to contact BaFin anonymously.

Whistleblowers can submit their reports to BaFin by letter, e-mail or telephone, in person or through an electronic reporting platform.

In 2016, the contact point for whistleblowers received a total of 124 reports. Half of them related to alleged violations by supervised institutions. BaFin investigates these reports, whose quality and significance varies considerably. Approximately one third of the submissions related to potentially unauthorised business activities, which BaFin also investigates.² Five reports related to complaints, which were passed to the consumer protection department for further processing. The remaining reports related to matters for which BaFin is not the competent authority, or that did not contain any identifiable facts.

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