Imagine this: one of your employees sits down late at night with a knot in their stomach. They’ve finally worked up the courage to report something that doesn’t feel right. They click into the reporting portal. They start typing. And then—bam—Category Required.
They stare at the options like they’re written in another language:
- Financial Irregularity
- Financial Misconduct/SOX
- Bribery
- Other Financial Violation
- Code of Conduct Violation
They pause. Is it SOX? Is it bribery? What if it’s both? What if it’s neither? The issue involves a manager pressuring someone to “smooth the numbers,” plus a weird “consulting fee” that smells like a bribe, plus retaliation vibes that don’t fit neatly anywhere. They feel the anxiety rise: If I choose the wrong category, will this go to the wrong person? Will it delay things? Will it make me look stupid?
Then they hit the next screen and realize the form won’t let them submit unless they fill out eight mandatory fields—dates, exact dollar amounts, names, locations, witnesses, policy references—some of which they don’t have, and some of which they’re scared to type. Their stomach drops.
They close the tab.
That’s abandonment. And if you’re not tracking it, you’re missing one of the clearest signals your reporting system can give you: your intake experience is pushing people away.
What “abandonment” actually means (and why it matters)
Abandonment is when someone starts a report (via hotline, web portal, text-based reporting, or email) and then gives up before completing it.
This matters for the simplest reason in the world – you can’t address what you never receive.
We spend a lot of time talking about “speak-up culture,” “psychological safety,” and “trust.” All important. But sometimes the barrier isn’t cultural—it’s practical. If you built a reporting pathway that feels hard, confusing, or risky in the moment someone is already stressed, you failed.
If your organization is serious about surfacing issues early, the first step is making it easy for someone to get the information out of their head and into your hands.
The hidden truth: people abandon reports for predictable reasons
Most abandonment isn’t about bad intent. It’s about overwhelm.
People are often reporting in a heightened emotional state: worried, angry, scared, conflicted, or all of the above. The reporting process should reduce friction, not add to it.
And yet, many systems unintentionally do the opposite, especially when the form is built like a legal spreadsheet instead of a human interaction.
Category overload is a silent report-killer
Let’s talk about categorization, because it’s one of the biggest offenders.
Compliance professionals love categories because categories equal metrics, trend data, dashboards, and reporting. I get it. I truly do. But here’s the problem: most employees don’t live in our taxonomy.
“Financial irregularity” and “Code of Conduct violation” mean something to you. To most people, those sound like two different flavors of the same scary thing. And “SOX” might as well be a brand of athletic wear if you don’t work in finance.
When you require employees to categorize up front, you’re asking them to do an expert task at the very moment they’re least equipped to do it.
And even worse: many issues don’t fit in one neat bucket. The reality of misconduct is messy. Bribery can involve expense fraud. Financial manipulation can involve retaliation. Harassment can involve misuse of company resources. The employee is trying to describe a situation with multiple layers, and your form is forcing them to pretend it’s one-dimensional.
That’s a fast track to “I can’t do this” and a closed browser tab.
Mandatory fields create the perfect excuse to quit
The other big abandonment driver is forms that demand too much information before allowing someone to hit submit.
Here’s a tough-love truth: if someone had all the details neatly organized, they probably wouldn’t be coming to you through the whistleblower system. They’d be sending you a PowerPoint.
People report because they know something feels wrong. They often don’t know exact dates, amounts, witnesses, or policy references. Sometimes they’re afraid to put names in writing. Sometimes they only have part of the story. Sometimes they’re testing whether the system feels safe.
When your form requires a long list of mandatory fields, you’re not just asking for information—you’re asking for certainty. And uncertainty is the default state of many reporters.
So the person does what humans do when faced with an impossible homework assignment: they walk away.
Best-in-class intake starts with one thing: let people talk
One of the simplest ways to reduce abandonment is also one of the most powerful: give people a path to submit the report in their own words without forcing categorization or excessive structure up front.
Let them tell you what happened. Let them explain why it concerns them. Let them describe the context.
You can still gather structured data—but you do it after you’ve captured the story, and you do it in a way that doesn’t require the reporter to become your compliance analyst.
This approach works for several reasons.
First, people are far more likely to share information when they don’t feel like they can “do it wrong.”
Second, real-world issues often involve multiple concerns, and free-form narrative captures complexity better than rigid drop-down menus ever will.
Third—and this is my favorite. Your are better at categorization than your employees are. You know your definitions. You know what matters to successfully triage the report. You know how you want data to roll up over time. When you categorize the issue, you’ll get cleaner, more usable trend data in the long run.
You’re not losing structure. You’re relocating it to the place it belongs: with the experts.
Track abandonment rates like the program-health metric it is
If you’re not measuring abandonment, you’re trying to improve your reporting program while wearing a blindfold.
At minimum, you want to know how many people start a report and don’t finish, and where they drop off. Is it the category screen? Is it the “mandatory fields” page? Is it the point where they’re asked to identify themselves? Is it on mobile?
Abandonment is one of the most honest metrics you’ll ever get. It tells you, quietly and clearly, when your process is too hard.
And once you have the data, you can do what good compliance teams do: test, refine, and make the system better.
Make whistleblowing easier because reporting is already hard
Let’s not forget the human reality here. Reporting misconduct is uncomfortable. It can feel risky. Your intake process should be the soft place to land—not another obstacle course.
If someone is brave enough to start a report, your job is to help them finish it.
So here’s your challenge: take a fresh look at your reporting channels and ask, “Where are we accidentally discouraging the very behavior we say we want?”
Because every abandoned report is a missed opportunity to address harm early. And every improvement you make is a signal to employees that you truly mean it when you say: We want to know. We’re ready to listen. And we’ll make it easier—not harder—for you to speak up.