One number, 37,445 calls

Proliferating reporting channels look like progress and usually are the opposite. When an institution offers five email addresses, three web forms and two phone lines, the result is not more reporting but more fragmentation: nobody knows which one to use, none of them feed the same database, and a report filed through the wrong channel disappears without anyone having decided to lose it. The Defense Sector went the other way: a single channel.

How to read the volume

As of July 2026, the 157 Anti-Corruption Line had received **37,445 calls**. That is a high figure for a payroll of this size, and it supports two simultaneous readings that are best placed side by side. The first is that a heavily used channel indicates people know it exists and believe it works — the worst possible outcome for a reporting line is not a large number but a number close to zero. The second is that not all of those calls are corruption reports: a single channel also absorbs queries, requests for guidance, and reports belonging to other subject matter. The figure measures the channel's reach, not the volume of wrongdoing.

Sixty-four open investigations

In parallel, the sector reports **64 active internal investigations** as of the same date. That number invites the same dual reading, and it deserves to be stated plainly: a sector with zero open internal investigations would not be a clean sector, it would be a sector that is not looking. An open investigation is evidence that a control worked, not that an offense occurred.

The condition that makes all of it work

Neither figure holds up without the piece that accompanies them: the whistleblower protection policy. A single high-traffic channel without real guarantees is a channel that runs dry within two years, once the first whistleblower pays the price and everyone else takes note. That policy, built from a diagnostic survey of 15,000 sector staff, is the indispensable counterpart to these 37,445 records.