Two legal compliance experts recently shared, in separate blog posts, why they believe in-house efforts to get employees to speak up about misconduct may be failing. It all comes down to trust, they said.

Lorene Schaefer, a former division general counsel at General Electric Co. and now managing partner of the boutique Atlanta law firm Schaefer & Associates, wrote about her in-house legal days when co-workers distrusted the human resources department, referring to HR as “the company spies.”