When something serious happens at work, nearly one in three Indian professionals (30%) would not take it to their employer. In a survey of 1,161 India-based professionals by Blind, the anonymous community app for professionals, 9% would go to the police, labour authorities or a lawyer, 10% to an anonymous app or social media, and 11% would not tell anyone.

Many don’t trust their company to handle it. Overall, 46% are not confident that a serious issue they report internally would be investigated fairly, including 27% who are not at all confident. Doubt is highest at some of India’s largest tech employers: 65% at Freshworks and Uber, 63% at Google, 62% at Amazon, 61% at Adobe and 60% at Microsoft.

That doubt has real-world grounds. Under India’s POSH Act, every employer with 10 or more employees must set up an Internal Committee (IC) to handle sexual harassment complaints. Yet in April, Nashik police arrested seven TCS employees, including team leaders and an assistant general manager, after nine FIRs alleging sexual harassment and coercion at a BPO campus. The AGM was arrested for allegedly ignoring a verbal complaint, which meant POSH procedures were never triggered. The National Commission for Women later reported “zero compliance of the POSH Act” at the workplace. On Blind, a Tech Mahindra employee described workplace harassment as “common practice.” Another user who said they had worked at the company wrote on Blind that many there “never fully trusted internal committees to work the way they’re supposed to on paper.”

Many workers don’t even know whether their company has an IC. Only half (50%) say their company has one and that they would know how to reach it. Another 35% say their company has no IC (17%) or that they don’t know whether it has one (18%). The gap is widest at Amazon, where 56% say there is no IC or that they don’t know, and only 21% know how to reach it. Workers at ServiceNow (48%), Microsoft (47%), Oracle (44%) and Uber (43%) are the next most likely to say there is no IC or that they don’t know. By contrast, at D. E. Shaw, 94% say they know how to reach their IC, followed by Qualcomm (73%) and Adobe (64%).

Knowing how to reach the IC does not necessarily mean using it. Half (50%) know how to reach their IC, but only 13% would go there or to an ethics hotline first. The most common first stop is a manager or skip-level (50%), the same route where the TCS complaint allegedly stalled before it ever reached the IC. At Adobe, 64% know how to reach their IC, yet 61% doubt a fair investigation.

Distrust can keep workers silent. Among respondents who are not at all confident that an internal report would be investigated fairly, 34% would not report a serious issue to anyone, compared with 11% of respondents overall.