Source: dnevnik.bg
NGO, Transparency International Bulgaria, wrote an open letter to the parliamentary committees to make urgent amendments to the draft law to transpose the EU Directive on whistleblowing.
The open letter states:
“While we support adoption of legislation that will allow irregularities to be freely reported and their causes addressed, we have always been concerned about how this should happen so that this opportunity is not misused, including by excessively increasing the administrative burden on the business or subjecting it to arbitrariness by the administration”
According to TI-Bulgaria, the proposed draft legislation has two main flaws. First, the draft law does not specify what benchmark the business-required internal rules for receiving reports should be compared to. Regulation is left to the declarative level of the Directive and therefore allows the supervising authorities to impose sanctions at their discretion.
The other concern is related to the provisions for attributing responsibilities to a single authority, the current Anticorruption Commission, as an external reporting channel, which also will investigate the complaints received. TI-Bulgaria warns that there might be competence disputes because currently there already exist a number of supervising bodies within the material scope of the Directive 1937/2019 and the draft law.