Yes, there certainly are, and it certainly is a good idea. There are actually four different layers or levels of players, if you like, in the disclosure process and the protection process. The first layer is actually line management and line supervisors as a disclosure option. The second is the internal audit, internal disclosure system, the agency's centralized system, which for a lot of employees is as challenging to go to as it is necessarily even to go outside.
Then you have other regulators. They might be the police, the auditor general, or any external independent agency that could be receiving disclosures and investigating. Then you have the agency who's responsible for ensuring there's protection. It's not so important that they're a disclosure channel, but typically they will be a disclosure channel as well, but they're certainly there as an independent agency to protect whistle-blowers. So you actually have four different actors or players, and that's without talking about the media, obviously, and third-party disclosures.
It's actually very important that there be multiple reporting avenues, because in any given situation you can't predict who can be trusted and who will be trusted by either the agency, or by the discloser or whistle-blower. There basically has to be a choice, and then it's important that all those players in the game know their role and be coordinated. That's why it's complex, but there's no other way around it. As soon as you start limiting it and saying that you only have one disclosure option, then you immediately make the whole system much less feasible, because it's very hard for people to go outside their normal chain of command very often. It's just not natural, and they just won't do it. But in other situations, you really have to provide for that because they simply won't trust either their line management or even the internal disclosure or internal audit unit. At this point they won't trust them either, and sometimes for good reason. That's why you must have multiple reporting channels.