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Employee reporting of noncompliance both within the organization and to external government agencies can be an important tool for enhancing compliance. Understanding and explaining whistle blowing by employees is central to the study of compliance, regulation and private action because it involves an individual decision by organization members to take action when confronting illegal practices (Near and Miceli, 1985: 4). This chapter argues that any attempt to understand compliance in organizational contexts must take into account not only organizational motivations to comply with laws and regulations, but also the motivations of individual employees (and other observers) to come forward and report noncompliance. With the increasing significance of decentralized techniques of regulatory enforcement, as observed by a number of contributors to this volume including May and Winter, and Gray and Silbey …