Hanzo Introduces Investigations for Compliance — Addressing the Rapid Growth of Hotline Reports in the Wake of #MeToo

AI-powered Hanzo Dynamic Investigator empowers compliance teams to efficiently and thoroughly conduct complex investigations involving employees by leveraging current data sources like web and social media pages to find evidence that can help substantiate allegations.


New York, NY, May 22, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, Hanzo is introducing Hanzo Dynamic Investigator for Compliance.  This AI-powered online investigations technology automates social media and web investigations—empowering compliance teams to conduct better, smarter, and faster compliance investigations. This new data and evidence can help substantiate allegations of misconduct, unethical behavior, and regulatory failure. Corporations can improve their response to the growing volume of hotline reports of harassment, misconduct, bribery, fraud, and other illegal and non-compliant activity that undermine employee confidence and damage a corporation’s culture and reputation. 

Harassment reporting is growing more prevalent in the wake of the #MeToo movement. October 2018 data from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) shows there’s been a 12 percent yearly increase in sexual harassment charges filed with the agency.1 The reporting category of “HR, Diversity, and Workplace Respect,” which sexual harassment and misconduct fall under, accounts for 70 percent of all hotline activity in NAVEX Global’s data set, comprised of over 1 million compliance hotline reporting data points from thousands of global organizations. 2 

With the increasing volume of whistleblowing and hotline reports of misconduct and newly published guidance from the Department of Justice (DOJ)3, compliance investigators are under pressure to promptly and thoroughly investigate and substantiate claims.  Unfortunately, only 41 percent of harassment reports and 29 percent of discrimination reports were substantiated in 2018.4  Moreover, case closure for these types of investigations has crept upwards of 40 days—well exceeding best practice case closure of 30-32 days.5  

In short, compliance teams are struggling to promptly confirm a majority of the reports they investigate, due in part to their inability to quickly and easily find the requisite evidence, which undermines program effectiveness and increases long-term corporate risk beyond any specific allegation of misconduct.

“Giving compliance and ethics teams access to rarely used, yet rich data sources like web and social media will help them become more effective at substantiating the results of investigations,” said, Jim Murphy, VP of Product, Hanzo. “We’re thrilled to help corporations make their compliance investigations more efficient through automation.”

With Hanzo Dynamic Investigator, compliance departments can increase investigation efficiency and speed, and equip teams with the knowledge to conduct more thorough interviews. Compliance teams can: 

  • Discover - Find answers and evidence with technology that identifies what you’re looking for across millions of pages of unstructured data that exists online.
  • Monitor - Set keyword-specific criteria for subjects and persons of interest and receive alerts in your inbox when matches occur. 
  • Preserve - Using tamper-proof WARC files, aligned with ISO28500 required WORM storage standards built to withstand the highest regulatory and legal scrutiny.
  • Analyze - Filter, sort, search, and report investigations results with powerful review capabilities and easy to use sharing tools. 




Special packages of Hanzo Dynamic Investigator are available to try on demand for a limited time through June 15. Learn more at https://www.hanzo.co/compliance-investigations

Sources
1 EEOC Releases Preliminary FY 2018 Sexual Harassment Data
2, 4, 5 NAVEX Global 2019 Ethics & Compliance Hotline Benchmark Report
3 U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Division, Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs (Updated April 2019)
About Hanzo
Hanzo is solving the single biggest challenge in legally-defensible compliance and litigation today— contextual investigation, capture, and preservation of dynamic web content.  Through the Hanzo Dynamic Archive platform, we investigate, hold, capture and preserve team messaging data, social media engagement, and interactive web content then replicate it in legally-defensible native format for analysis, review, and production.  Launched in 2009, Hanzo serves government agencies, enterprises, and top law firms across the globe. Learn more at hanzo.co

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Empowering compliance teams to efficiently and thoroughly conduct complex investigations using current data sources like web and social media pages to find evidence that can help substantiate allegations.

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