Why should I submit a report?

The damage caused by corruption is immense and affects us all. There is a large number of unreported crimes.

Only with your help can criminal activities be uncovered at an early stage, perpetrators identified and further damage prevented. As a whistleblower your anonymity will be preserved at all times if you wish.

Use this opportunity and do your part to fight and investigate corruption.

Which kind of reports can be submitted?

Only reports of corruption offenses can be submitted. This includes, for example, offenses such as bribery and corruption, acceptance and granting of advantages.

For questions or hints to other types of crime, please contact your nearest police station. You have also the option to report a criminal offence online (www.polizei.hamburg.de/onlinewache).

What is the process for submitting a report? What is a postbox and how do I set up one?

To submit an anonymous or personalised report, start by clicking the “Submit report“ button at the top of our introduction page.

There are 3 steps to the report process:

1. First, you will be asked to read some information on the protection of your anonymity and to respond to a security query.
2. On the report page, you can elaborate on your report in your own words and answer questions about the incident by simply selecting responses. You can type up to 5000 characters into the free text field, which corresponds to a full A4 page. You may also submit a file of up to 5 MB to support your report. Please do bear in mind that documents can contain information about the author. Following the submission of your report, you will receive a reference number as confirmation that you have forwarded this report.
3. Please subsequently set up your own secured postbox. You will receive feedback from us via this postbox, including answers to questions and information about the progress of your report.

When setting up your secured mailbox, you choose the pseudonym/username and password yourself. These access data are not known to anyone but yourself. If you lose your access data, please submit a new report and set up a new postbox. If possible, please include the reference number of your old report. Since this is a new postbox, the contents of your old report are not available here.

If you already have a secured postbox, you can access it directly via the ”Login“ button. First, you will have to answer a security query.

As long as you do not enter any data from which conclusions about your person can be drawn, the technology of the BKMS^® System will protect your anonymity.

Please rest assured that we are interested only in the incident you are reporting. Malpractices should be revealed and financial losses prevented.

How do I remain anonymous?

The main principle of the procedure used here is the protection of the whistleblower. An independent authority certifies the functionality of the anonymity protection.

Your report is kept anonymous by encryption and other special security routines. If you submit your report anonymously, you should not provide any personal information about yourself. Do not enter any data that could be used to identify you, not even in free text.

On the system side, there is no storage for the identification of suitable data (e.g. IP address). The connection between you and the BKMS^® System is technically protected by encryption in accordance with the BSI standard. This means that both the connection itself and the transmitted data are secure. You can only access your secured postbox by entering the user name and password that you have specified yourself. Only you know these access data. The data in your mailbox is double encrypted and the operator of the BKMS^® System cannot see it.

Please note that submitting a notice via a computer in an authority or company network can endanger your anonymity. If you want to attach files to your report, please note that the file properties / metadata may contain personal information. If in doubt, you can also print out the relevant document and send it by mail to DIE (Department of Internal Investigations), stating the reference number that you will receive when you complete your report.

What happens to my report? How do I get feedback?

If a criminal offense is suspected based on your report, a criminal investigation will be initiated. The investigations are conducted in close coordination with the responsible public prosecutor's office, which also decides on the outcome of the proceedings in each case. Since corruption offenses require very complex investigations, proceedings longer than a year are common.

If your report does not reveal any suspicion of a criminal offense, it is checked to determine whether it is necessary to forward your report to another authority and whether it is permissible under data protection law.

Via the secured postbox a DIE (Department of Internal Investigations) employee will give you feedback as to what is happening with your message or will ask questions if details are still unclear - you will remain anonymous during this dialogue.