We publish assessments of other organisations. That is only defensible if there is a way to hold us to the same standard, and a way that does not depend on knowing somebody here.
This page is that route. It covers how we have behaved: our conduct, our independence, how we handled your information, how we treated you. It is deliberately separate from disagreeing with a grade, which has its own process and a different remedy.
If this is about a grade or a finding, start here instead
A grievance will not change a grade. Only evidence changes a grade, and the process built for that is the right of reply: you submit evidence against the specific finding, we assess it, and if it warrants a change the grade moves and the history stays visible.
Raise it on your audit at app.howlegit.com, or write to hello@howlegit.com. Every audited organisation has free access to its own findings.
Use this page instead if your concern is that the process was unfair, not that the conclusion was wrong. Both at once is common, and you do not have to work out which is which. Send it and we will route it, and we will tell you how we routed it.
Who this is for
Anyone affected by what we do, not only the organisations we assess.
- An organisation we have audited, on how the audit was conducted, how you were contacted, or whether you were given a fair chance to respond before publication.
- A person we have named. Some assessments include governance profiles that name directors and officers. If you are named in one, you can ask us to correct it, to show you the sources, or to remove material that does not bear on a published claim.
- Someone who gave us information, including anyone who asked us to scan a sector, on how that information was handled or how you were described.
- Anyone else who believes our work has affected them unfairly, whether or not you have had any dealings with us.
What you can raise
- Bias, or a conflict of interest that should have been declared.
- An assessment influenced by payment, pressure, or a relationship.
- Personal data held, published, or shared when it should not have been.
- Being named without a reasonable opportunity to respond first.
- Conduct by anyone working for us, including how you were spoken to.
- A published statement that is factually wrong and is not a graded finding.
- A failure to follow our own published methodology or this policy.
What we will not do
Saying this plainly is fairer than letting you find out at the end.
- We will not remove a finding because publishing it is inconvenient, commercially or otherwise. Evidence moves findings. Nothing else does.
- We will not take a grievance from one party as a reason to change what we have published about another.
- We will not discuss somebody else's grievance with you.
- We will not require you to sign anything, waive anything, or keep the outcome confidential as a condition of being heard.
How to raise one
Write to hello@howlegit.com with Grievance in the subject line. In English or in Polish, whichever you would rather use.
It helps if you can tell us what happened, when, who or what it concerns, and what you would like us to do. If you do not have all of that, send what you have. We will ask rather than close it.
You do not need a lawyer, and a grievance written in your own words carries exactly the same weight as one written on letterhead.
Anonymously: you can raise a grievance without giving your name and we will investigate it. Be aware of the limit, which is not a condition but a consequence: if we cannot reach you we cannot ask the questions that often decide the outcome, and we cannot tell you what we found.
What happens then
- Within 2 business days we acknowledge it, in writing, and tell you who is handling it.
- Within 18 working days we respond in full: what we found, what we are doing, and what we are not doing and why. If it will take longer than that we will tell you before the 18 days are up, not after, with a reason and a new date.
- If we got it wrong, we say so and we fix it. Where something published was wrong, the correction appears on the same page as the original and the record of the change stays visible. We do not quietly edit.
Who decides, and where that is uncomfortable
Grievances are handled by the audit team, and not by the person the grievance is about. That last part matters more than the first.
HowLegit is small, and we would rather state the limits of that than imply a structure we do not yet have. HowLegit operates in incubation with the Twoj Startup foundation while its independent structure is established. The platform is built by Optomize, HowLegit's technology partner, and Optomize and HowLegit share a founder.
A mechanism where the person complained about decides the complaint is not a mechanism, and we would flag it as a gap in anyone else's organisation.
We do not yet have an independent reviewer, and we are not going to imply one. An organisation our size can appoint somebody properly or announce somebody quickly, and announcing would be the version of this page that reads best and means least.
So here is what happens today where a grievance concerns the founder, the Optomize relationship, or any conflict of interest:
- The person it concerns takes no part in deciding it, and does not see it before the decision is made.
- Our response says, in the response itself, that the conflict exists and that nobody independent has reviewed it. You should not have to work that out.
- You do not have to come through us at all. The routes below are open to you from the start, including instead of this process rather than after it. Where a grievance falls in this category we will say so and point you at them, whatever we conclude ourselves.
- It is recorded as a conflict grievance and counted separately in what we publish each year, so that a run of them is visible rather than absorbed.
When this changes. We will appoint an independent reviewer by 31 March 2027, or on the first grievance that falls in this category, whichever comes first. A grievance mechanism that waits until an organisation is large enough is one that arrives after the years in which it was most needed. When the appointment is made, this page will name them.
Raising one costs you nothing, and changes nothing
There is no fee. It does not count against the regrade allowance. It will not affect your grade, your standing in the register, or how we assess you in future.
We say this because the fear is reasonable. An organisation deciding whether to complain about its own assessor is entitled to wonder what it costs them. It costs nothing, and if you ever have reason to believe otherwise, say so and it is treated as a conflict grievance under the section above, with every route out of our hands still open to you.
If you are not satisfied
Nothing here replaces your other rights, and using this process does not give up any of them.
- Ask for a review. Reply and say so. A different person looks at it, including the material from the first round.
- Data protection. If your concern is about personal data, you may complain to a supervisory authority. In Poland that is the President of the Personal Data Protection Office (UODO). In New Zealand it is the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.
- Legal remedies. This process does not limit your ability to take the matter further, and we will not treat your doing so as a reason to stop engaging with you.
What we record, and what we publish
Every grievance is logged with the date it arrived, what it concerned, who handled it, what we decided, and what changed as a result. That record is how a pattern becomes visible instead of each complaint being handled and forgotten.
Once a year we publish how many grievances we received, what categories they fell into, and how many led to a change in something published or in how we work. No names, no identifying detail. If the number is zero we will publish that too, and it should be read as the weak evidence it is: a mechanism nobody uses is as likely to be unreachable as it is to be unnecessary.
The standard we are holding ourselves to
Our human rights assessments test organisations against the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, including Principle 31, which sets out what makes a grievance mechanism effective: legitimate, accessible, predictable, equitable, transparent, rights-compatible, and a source of continuous learning.
This policy is written against those criteria on purpose. We would not accept from an audited organisation a mechanism that had no timeline, no route around a conflict of interest, and no record of what it changed. It would be a strange thing to grade others on and not build.
We do not claim to meet every criterion fully today. Independence is the one to watch, and it is named above rather than buried. As the independent structure is established, this page will be updated to say what actually changed.
Contact
hello@howlegit.com, subject line Grievance.
Related: terms, privacy and the dispute process, and our published methodology.