Blowing the whistle

The European directive on the subject is named after the people it protects rather than the reports they file: on the protection of persons who report breaches of Union law. That title is the whole argument. Detection software flags an anomaly at no cost to itself, and monitoring systems raise more alerts in a night than a compliance team reads in a month. What the law builds around is the person who knew, who could have kept quiet, and who will be moved, demoted or sued for having spoken. The directive works by forbidding those reprisals and reversing the burden of proof, which only makes sense where there is someone to retaliate against. Nobody has ever needed to protect a monitoring rule from retaliation, and no rule has ever hesitated.