When the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) announced that ANZ Bank had admitted to widespread misconduct and agreed to pay $240 million in penalties, the headlines focused on the staggering figure and the breadth of wrongdoing. But within the details of this case lie two fundamental questions… ones that should prompt reflection for every organisational leader in Australia:
What systems, processes, and cultural conditions allow serious problems to persist across an organisation? And what can organisations do to detect and address issues earlier, before they escalate?
Note: This article is based on publicly available information from ASIC’s media releases and associated reporting. It is intended for educational and thought leadership purposes and does not constitute legal advice. While we don’t have complete visibility into ANZ’s internal dynamics, the publicly available information from ASIC’s proceedings offers valuable lessons about the conditions that can allow problems to develop and persist. This article examines those patterns—not to single out one organisation, but to explore principles that apply across many organisations facing similar challenges. Organisations should consult appropriate legal and compliance advisers for guidance specific to their circumstances.
The Anatomy of Organisational Silence
The circumstances described in ASIC’s proceedings offer valuable insights into what can happen when a speak up culture faces challenges at multiple levels. Consider what unfolded over several years across ANZ’s operations.
In the bond trading division, there were “internal concerns about the accuracy of the data” being reported to the Australian Government, yet the misreporting continued for nearly two years. Information that could have triggered escalation appears not to have reached decision makers, or wasn’t acted upon with sufficient urgency.
In hardship services, 488 customers submitted financial hardship notices between May 2022 and September 2024, with some waiting over two years for a response. These customers were experiencing unemployment, serious medical issues, bereavement, and family violence—circumstances that demanded timely attention.
In retail banking, systems failures meant bonus interest wasn’t paid to nearly 195,000 accounts over an 11 year period. Another 56,703 customers were promised interest rates that weren’t delivered. These issues persisted across core banking functions affecting tens of thousands of people.
For deceased estates, over a four year period ANZ’s systems couldn’t identify which fees should have been waived for deceased customers, and the bank struggled to respond to grieving family members within required timeframes. While ANZ identified this issue internally in 2022, resolution took over a year.
The pattern reveals a critical challenge faced by organisations: information existed within the organisation that should have been indicative of serious regulatory and other breaches, but that information didn’t translate into timely action.
When Having a Process Isn’t Enough
What makes cases like this particularly instructive is that large institutions undoubtedly have comprehensive compliance frameworks, risk management systems, and reporting channels in place. Like most major organisations, ANZ had a whistleblowing policy, compliance officers and risk managers, internal audit functions, legal and regulatory teams, and board oversight committees.
Yet these structures didn’t sufficiently detect or prevent what ASIC identified as widespread issues. This marks ANZ’s eleventh civil penalty proceeding brought by ASIC since 2016, with total penalties now exceeding $310 million. ASIC Deputy Chair Sarah Court noted “serious inadequacies across multiple levels and multiple divisions of ANZ and a clear failure to manage non-financial risk.”
This pattern suggests something many organisations face: having reporting mechanisms in place doesn’t automatically mean those mechanisms are functioning effectively to surface and address concerns before they escalate.
The Multiple Levels of Silence
Organisational silence operates at three interconnected levels, and understanding these can help organisations strengthen their speak up culture.
Individual Silence: When People Don’t Speak Up
At the frontline, employees may witness problems but hesitate to report them. Research has documented the reasons well:
- Fear of retaliation or career impact
- Belief that nothing will change
- Uncertainty about whether the issue is “serious enough” to report
- Lack of clarity about how or where to report
- Previous experiences where speaking up didn’t lead to positive outcomes
In environments where silence becomes normalised, even well intentioned individuals may learn to look away. The cost of speaking up begins to feel higher than the risk of staying quiet.
Systemic Silence: When Information Doesn’t Flow Effectively
Even when people do speak up, organisational systems can struggle to transmit information effectively. This includes:
- Reports that may not reach appropriate decision makers
- Concerns that are categorised as “operational issues” rather than escalated as risk matters
- Fragmented reporting systems where patterns aren’t visible
- Cultural dynamics that make it difficult for unwelcome news to travel upward
The ANZ hardship matter illustrates this challenge clearly. ASIC notified ANZ of issues with its financial hardship processes in June 2023. The bank took steps to address the problems, but those fixes “did not work consistently, resulting in some further failures by ANZ up to September 2024.”
This demonstrates how difficult it can be to not only identify problems, but to implement solutions that work reliably across complex organisations.
Leadership Reception: When Action Doesn’t Follow
The most critical challenge occurs when information reaches leadership but doesn’t translate into meaningful action quickly enough. ASIC’s observation that there are “fundamental issues with ANZ’s risk and compliance culture that require the Board’s and executives’ urgent attention” highlights the importance of leadership level reception and response to emerging concerns.
Leaders set the tone. When they demonstrate that speaking up is valued—even welcomed—organisations create the conditions for early problem solving. When these signals aren’t clear or consistent, speaking up becomes riskier.
The Human Impact and Accountability
While we discuss organisational dynamics and systems, it’s important to remember the real world impact when these systems face challenges.
In the ANZ case, when responses to hardship notices were delayed, real people experienced consequences. Customers already struggling with unemployment received debt collection notices. People dealing with serious medical issues saw their credit ratings affected. Survivors of family violence faced additional financial stress. Bereaved family members, navigating grief, encountered delays and complications.
When systems failed to pay promised interest, tens of thousands of customers simply didn’t receive money they were owed.
When deceased estate processes struggled, families dealing with the death of loved ones faced compounded difficulties in an already challenging time.
When speak up systems face challenges, vulnerable people often experience the greatest impact. This is why building effective, compassionate reporting mechanisms isn’t just about compliance—it’s about protecting the people your organisation serves.
Where significant issues are identified, organisations must take meaningful corrective action. It’s important to note that ANZ admitted to these failures and has undertaken significant remediation totalling millions of dollars, launched enhanced oversight programs, and appointed independent experts to review progress.
The question for organisations is whether they can identify and address concerns proactively, before they reach this scale.
What Creates the Conditions for Silence?
Research on organisational silence points to several factors that can make speaking up difficult.
Competing Priorities
ASIC cited ANZ’s challenges in managing “non-financial risk across the bank.” In any organisation, when commercial pressures and financial metrics dominate attention, other concerns including ethical issues, customer welfare, and risk management, can inadvertently receive less focus. The urgent crowds out the important until the important becomes urgent in ways no one wanted.
Complexity and Scale
Large, complex organisations can create environments where no single person sees the full picture, responsibility for cross cutting issues is unclear, and problems fall into gaps between business units. The ANZ matters spanned Institutional and Retail divisions, hardship teams, IT systems, estates processing, and more. In such complexity, ownership of concerns can become diffused, and everyone’s responsibility becomes no one’s responsibility.
Normalisation Over Time
When issues persist without resolution, there’s a risk they become normalised. What starts as a concerning exception can gradually become accepted as “just how things work.” This gradual shift in what feels acceptable is one of the most insidious threats to organisational integrity.
Psychological Safety Challenges
Google’s Project Aristotle research identified psychological safety as foundational to high performing teams. In psychologically safe environments, people feel they can ask questions without being dismissed, admit mistakes without fear of punishment, challenge approaches constructively, and raise concerns without risking their careers.
When psychological safety is limited, silence can feel like the safer choice—even when that silence prevents early problem solving that could protect the organisation and those it serves.
The Self Detection Question
One of the most instructive aspects of the ANZ case is the role external parties played in identifying issues. ASIC notified ANZ about hardship process challenges. ASIC investigations revealed the bond trading concerns. External regulatory action brought several matters to resolution.
For any organisation, this raises an important question: Are we learning about our own problems internally, or are we discovering them through external channels?
When external parties consistently identify issues before internal systems do, it suggests opportunities to strengthen internal detection and escalation mechanisms. The goal isn’t to avoid external scrutiny, but to build organisations that can see their own problems clearly and address them proactively.
Building Cultures Where People Can, and Do, Speak Up
The ANZ case provides valuable lessons that apply across organisations of all types. Creating environments where people feel safe to speak up and where leaders are equipped to truly listen—requires intentional effort across multiple fronts.
Beyond Policy: Creating Actual Culture
Whistleblowing policies, compliance hotlines, and reporting processes are necessary foundations, but they’re not sufficient on their own. The deeper questions are whether people know about these mechanisms, whether they trust them, whether they believe using them will lead to constructive outcomes, and if reporting is infrequent, whether that’s because everything is working well or because barriers exist.
Policy documents sitting in SharePoint folders don’t create safety. Lived experience of seeing concerns heard and addressed creates trust that makes speak up culture real.
Understanding What Silence Might Mean
If an organisation rarely or never receives speak up reports, this deserves careful consideration. Very low reporting volumes might indicate that people don’t feel sufficiently safe to report, that they doubt whether reporting will make a difference, that issues are being handled informally in ways that bypass formal channels, or that concerns are not being raised at all.
Healthy organisations typically have regular, flowing communication about concerns, issues, and improvements. Silence isn’t necessarily golden—sometimes it’s a warning sign.
The Value of Independence
Internal reporting channels can face inherent challenges: power dynamics that make it difficult to report about senior colleagues, potential conflicts when the subject of concern has influence over the reporter’s career, organisational pressures around reputation management, and cultural dynamics that can complicate internal disclosure.
Independent, external reporting channels can provide psychological distance that helps people speak up when internal channels feel complicated. Independent channels also offer the ability to communicate anonymously—particularly valuable in organisations where trust is still being built. This is particularly relevant for issues involving senior leadership, cultural concerns, or matters where internal handling has faced difficulties.
Pattern Recognition, Not Just Case Handling
The ANZ hardship matter involved 488 customers over more than two years. The bonus interest issue affected nearly 195,000 accounts over 11 years. The deceased estates challenges spanned four years. These weren’t isolated incidents—they were patterns developing over time.
Effective speak up systems don’t just handle individual reports; they aggregate information to identify systemic trends before they become significant problems. One report at your organisation might be an outlier. Three reports with similar themes suggest a pattern. Five reports point to a systemic issue that needs urgent attention.
Response Determines Trust
ASIC noted that after being notified about hardship process issues, ANZ’s corrective steps “did not work consistently.” This highlights a crucial point: having channels for speaking up is only the beginning.
Organisations should:
- Listen carefully when concerns are raised
- Investigate thoroughly and objectively
- Take meaningful corrective action
- Follow through to ensure solutions work effectively
- Close the feedback loop with those who raised concerns
When people speak up and see no meaningful change—or see temporary fixes that don’t hold—trust in the system erodes. The next person with a concern stays silent because they’ve learned that speaking up is costly and futile.
Leadership Sets the Tone
The most psychologically safe organisations are led by people who:
- Actively seek out diverse perspectives, including dissenting views
- Respond to concerns with curiosity and openness
- Recognise people who raise difficult issues constructively
- Acknowledge mistakes when they occur
- Demonstrate that speaking up leads to positive outcomes
Creating conditions where leaders hear about emerging problems early, when issues are still manageable, requires intentional cultivation of speak up culture. This isn’t something that happens by accident or through policy alone. It requires daily choices by leaders to show that they value truth over comfort.
The Broader Costs
The $240 million in penalties in the ANZ case represents the direct financial cost. But challenges like these typically carry broader impacts.
Reputational effects mean public association with adverse risk and compliance issues. Stakeholder relationships may suffer through the impact on customer, investor, and community trust. Employee experience takes a hit through effects on staff morale and engagement. Regulatory scrutiny increases going forward. Resources get diverted through executive time, legal costs, remediation expenses, and focus pulled from strategic priorities.
And most significantly: preventable impacts on people’s lives. Behind every risk and/or compliance matter are human consequences.
Questions Every Leader Should Consider
The ANZ case invites reflection across all organisations:
- When did you last receive a speak up report? If reports are very rare, what might that indicate about your culture and systems?
- How do you know people feel safe to speak up? Have you measured psychological safety? Have you asked? What signals do you observe?
- What happens when someone does speak up? Can you point to examples where raising concerns led to positive change and recognition?
- How effectively can your organisation detect patterns? Do you have systems that aggregate and analyse information to spot developing issues? Or would problems need to grow quite large before anyone noticed?
- How well do you receive difficult information? When unwelcome news comes your way, how do you and your leadership team typically respond?
- Where might information gaps exist? What might you not be hearing about? What might be harder for people to tell you?
These aren’t comfortable questions. But they’re essential ones.
Moving Forward: From Silence to Voice
The encouraging reality is that speak up culture can be built, strengthened, and restored—in any organisation willing to commit to the work.
This requires genuine commitment from leadership. Leaders must visibly prioritise psychological safety and demonstrate through consistent actions that speaking up is valued and leads to positive outcomes. Words in a policy won’t create safety on their own, but actions repeated over time will.
It requires investment in multiple channels. Strong speak up cultures need both external independent channels and robust internal mechanisms working together. The most effective approach offers genuine choice, recognising that different situations and different comfort levels call for different reporting pathways.
It requires trauma informed approaches. Many people who speak up—particularly about serious concerns—may be experiencing stress, uncertainty, or even trauma. Reports should be received with care, professionalism, and appropriate support. How organisations respond to people who speak up matters as much as whether they have a channel to speak up at all.
It requires systematic analysis. Moving beyond individual case handling to pattern recognition helps spot systemic issues early, before they grow into the kind of widespread problems ASIC identified at ANZ.
It requires closing the loop. Demonstrating to people who speak up that their concerns were heard, taken seriously, and led to meaningful action builds the trust that makes the next person more willing to speak up.
And it requires cultural evolution. Sustained effort to develop norms, behaviours, and systems that move toward openness, accountability, and continuous improvement. Culture isn’t built in a day, but it’s built—or eroded—by the daily choices leaders and organisations make. Yet like reputation, it can be lost in an instant. A single poorly handled disclosure can undo years of trust building, which is why protecting speak up culture requires constant vigilance, not just initial investment.
A Choice Every Organisation Faces
Cases like ANZ’s present a choice for every Australian organisation.
You can discover problems when they surface through regulatory processes, external scrutiny, or crisis—dealing with the costs in penalties, reputation, stakeholder relationships, and human impact.
Or you can create conditions where your own people tell you about problems early, when they’re still manageable, because they trust they’ll be heard and that speaking up will lead to constructive change.
The difference between these paths is measured not just in financial costs and regulatory outcomes, but in the wellbeing of your stakeholders, the strength of your culture, and the trust you build with your community.
The question isn’t whether challenges will arise in your organisation. The question is whether you’ll hear about them early from your people, or discover them later through other means.
About Your Call
Your Call supports organisations across Australia to build and sustain speak up cultures through independent, trauma informed reporting services. With over 20 years of experience and a deep commitment to psychological safety, we help create environments where people feel safe to speak up.
We understand that behind every report is a person who has made a difficult decision to speak up. Our approach honours that courage while giving organisations the insights they need to address concerns before they escalate.
If you’re reviewing your organisation’s speak up systems, capabilities, or compliance frameworks, we’d welcome a conversation about how independent reporting services might complement your existing approaches. Visit whistleblowing.com.au or contact our team at 1300 788 712 or [email protected].