The Changing Face of Workplace Misconduct

Workplace misconduct hasn’t disappeared, but it is changing shape. What employees are raising concerns about in 2026 reveals a significant mismatch between where many organisations have been focusing their risk attention and where the actual harm is occurring.

New analysis of reporting activity from Report It Now™ for 2026 offers some answers.

It’s Not Primarily About Fraud

Most organisations picture fraud when they think about workplace misconduct. A hand in the till. A falsified expense claim. Something financial, something quantifiable, something they can insure against.

The 2026 data tells a different story.

In 2026 to date, bullying and harassment is the leading category of concern raised through the Report It Now™ platform, accounting for one in three reports (33.3%)*. Health and safety concerns follow at 26.7%. Theft and fraud — the category that tends to dominate boardroom risk conversations — accounts for just 13.3% of reports, equal to general misconduct and potential reputational damage.

This is consistent with what New Zealand’s Ombudsman has observed in its own data, where financial mismanagement, unsafe work practices, and harassment consistently rank among the most common issues raised by whistleblowers. The misconduct employees most want to report is interpersonal and cultural, not just financial.

There’s a long-established body of evidence around financial fraud and its detection. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) has documented that 43% of occupational fraud is detected through tip-offs — more than any other method. 

Modern organisations have come to understand that fraud is as much a reporting problem as much as a control problem. But the prevalence of bullying, harassment, and health and safety concerns in the 2026 data suggests that the most common harms occurring in New Zealand workplaces right now aren’t financial. They’re interpersonal. Cultural. And they are, historically, the hardest for internal channels to surface.

Employees who experience harassment at the hands of a manager are unlikely to report it to that manager’s peers. Employees who witness unsafe practices are unlikely to raise concerns if they fear being seen as troublemakers. These are the reports that internal systems quietly suppress — not through malice, but through structural limitation.

Reporting Workplace Misconduct: Anonymity Is the Enabler

The 2026 data shows that 65% of workplace misconduct reports submitted through the Report It Now™ platform were made anonymously. A further 10% were submitted under Authority to Enquire (ATE) — meaning the reporter consented to limited follow-up without full disclosure. Only 25% of reporters fully identified themselves.

This distribution matters. The majority of people who used the platform to raise a concern would not have done so without the protection anonymity affords. They had something to say. They needed a safe way to say it.

Research into New Zealand workplaces reinforces why this matters. Despite 77% of NZ employees being aware their organisation has written ethical standards, 30% of New Zealand public agencies still have no system in place for recording and tracking concerns raised. For employees in those organisations, there is effectively nowhere safe to go — which is precisely why independent, third-party channels exist.

The 2026 data also shows a clear channel preference: three in four reports (75%) were submitted online, with the remaining 25% made via the call centre. People are choosing digital, low-friction channels when they’re available — which has implications for organisations still relying primarily on phone-based or face-to-face reporting options.

What Happens When Reports Are Taken Seriously

Perhaps the most significant figure in the 2026 data is the substantiation rate: 84.2% of closed cases were substantiated.

This means that the overwhelming majority of concerns raised through the platform had merit. People weren’t misusing the channel. They weren’t raising vexatious complaints. They were reporting genuine problems — problems their organisations needed to know about.

A high substantiation rate through an independent channel reflects the quality of reporting that anonymity and trust enable. When employees know they won’t face consequences for speaking up, they report real concerns. When they’re not confident of that, they stay quiet — and problems compound.

The consequences of staying quiet are well documented in New Zealand. The Employment Relations Authority’s landmark ruling in the BNZ whistleblower case — which found the bank had acted with retaliatory intent in dismissing an employee who made a protected disclosure — is one of the most significant examples of what happens when internal processes fail the people they’re meant to protect. The ERA found BNZ’s whistleblowing policies were “confusing” and unfit for the New Zealand context. It’s a lesson in what poor handling costs — financially, reputationally, and culturally.

Of closed cases in 2026, the average resolution time was 22 working days — with a range of 3 to 39 days depending on complexity. For organisations managing these cases, this represents a workable and defensible timeframe, provided investigations are properly resourced and documented from the outset.

What Organisations Should Take From This

The 2026 data reinforces several things that research has long suggested but that practice has been slow to reflect.

Workplace misconduct is broader than fraud. Risk registers that focus narrowly on financial wrongdoing are missing the categories of harm that employees are most likely to experience. Bullying, harassment, and health and safety failures carry their own financial consequences — in turnover, absenteeism, and litigation risk — but they rarely appear in traditional fraud risk frameworks.

Anonymous reporting works. Resolution speed matters. And as complaint volumes continue to rise across New Zealand, the organisations that will manage this environment well are those that have invested in independent, structured reporting infrastructure — not those relying on the assumption that employees will speak up through internal channels when the conditions aren’t right for them to do so.

To find out how EthicsPro® can work for your organisation, get in touch. 

*Data sourced from Report It Now™ client reporting platform, January–April 2026.