Generally speaking, a whistle-blower will be probably want to report something that he or she believes to be somewhere between blatantly unethical and morally q

Generally speaking, a whistle-blower will be probably want to report something that he or she believes to be somewhere between blatantly unethical and morally questionable, and illegality will only come into play under the assumption that an illegal act is automatically dubious, at minimum. It could be something like "Mr. X is submitting exactly the same report with only the dates changed on subsequent days to meet his analysis quotas". That's legal, but unethical. Now, the whistle-keeper should be expected to at least investigate the facts as reported by the whistle-blower, rather than say, "You didn't really see what you saw. Maybe Mr. X actually did redo the analysis work on subsequent days and just coincidentally got the same results? Nothing to see here; case closed." The whistle-keeper has a duty to anonymize the source by independently investigating, then to determine whether the complaint is actionable, escalate appropriately, and then tell the original source(s) what was done and why. If you aren't doing that, you're at best a black hole for complaints, and at worst a honeypot for snaring employees that won't "go along to get along". Then potential whistle-blowers will recognize your disingenuous uselessness, and route around it by going further up the chain of command or leaking to an outsider. In order for whistle-blower protection to work, the ethics hotline has to do its freaking job and be trustworthy.