Configurability, data reporting, AI: CoreCivic's must-have list for a new platform

CoreCivic is a government-solutions company based in Brentwood, Tennessee, that partners with federal, state, and local agencies on corrections, detention, and residential reentry programs across the United States. The company employs approximately 10,000 people who work in facilities around the country, often across shifts where a compliance contact is not always on-site.

Susan Matt, Senior Director of Ethics & Compliance at CoreCivic, leads a small team responsible for handling an unusually high volume of reports: 200 to 300 every month, arriving through two separate lines, one for employee concerns and one for resident family and friends. Keeping both organized, she says, depends on trusting the system behind them.

The challenge

CoreCivic didn't choose to change ethics reporting platforms. The provider it was using got acquired, and the ethics-line side of that business was then acquired again by a different company. What Matt expected to be a straightforward move to an "upgraded" version of the same platform turned out to be anything but.

"We found it to be quite rigid, and it did not have the ability to configure the system to our needs," Matt says. "We were told, this is the system, and you sort of have to learn to work within the confines of it."

Her team built workarounds, but the lack of flexibility, combined with weak data reporting, made an already demanding job harder.

That difficulty was compounded by scale. CoreCivic's report volume runs well above what similar organizations typically see. "Per 100 employees, we are significantly higher than benchmark," Matt says. "Benchmark numbers will typically say two to three employees out of 100 will file a report. Ours is more like 15." With a three-person team managing 200 to 300 reports a month across two reporting lines, an inflexible system was not a minor inconvenience.

Why they chose SpeakUp

When CoreCivic went looking for a new platform on its own terms this time, Matt's team knew what it needed. Configurability topped the list, given the specific ways CoreCivic manages reports and interacts with employees across dozens of facilities. Reliable data reporting mattered too, after years of manual exports and workarounds, and so did the ability to put AI to work, something Matt sees as increasingly central to how compliance teams will operate. What ultimately won CoreCivic over, though, was less technical.

"The personalized service is really what has sort of won our hearts," Matt says. "We got a really good sense that we would be supported, not only through implementation, but afterward."

Once CoreCivic saw how SpeakUp Report could be configured around its actual workflows, Matt says the decision made itself.

Implementation

CoreCivic is currently rolling out SpeakUp, with go-live planned for later this year. The system needs to serve two internal teams: Matt's Ethics & Compliance group, which fields and informally resolves concerns, and the Legal department's investigations team, which handles cases that require a formal inquiry. Early in the rollout, the two sides realized they were trying to configure both case types at once and stepped back to sequence the work instead, standard cases first, more complex ones next.

Given the forced migration that came before it, Matt admits her team approached this rollout with some wariness.

"Implementation, I will say, at least for me personally, is never a fun thing," she says. "But under the circumstances, we know that it's the right thing to do for us, and we're really excited about what the outcome is going to be."

Results and impact so far

CoreCivic is still mid-implementation, so the numbers that will ultimately define this shift, report handling time, data quality, resolution speed under that above-benchmark volume, are still ahead. What has already changed is how supported the team feels getting there.

"The hands-on approach we've experienced from SpeakUp so far is such that if we can't get to something, if we don't understand something, all we have to do is raise our hand and ask the question," Matt says. "We're led through the process very, very smoothly."

That is a deliberate contrast with a previous vendor relationship where, once implementation ended, CoreCivic was largely on its own.

For a team of three handling so many reports a month, that difference in how implementation itself feels is not a small thing.

What's next for CoreCivic

Looking ahead, Matt's team is reconsidering how it talks about its ethics line, including a broader look at CoreCivic's values messaging to employees.

The next phase, once the current rollout is complete, is bringing facility-based investigators into the system directly, so information can pass between informal resolutions and formal investigations without gaps. "That'll be certainly better for my team," Matt says, "but also for the ultimate end user: the reporting party."

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Susan Matt has served as CoreCivic's Senior Director of Ethics & Compliance since 2019, overseeing day-to-day management of the program. She brings two decades of compliance and investigations experience to the role, including senior positions leading compliance and ethics programs at Target and Best Buy. She began her career at the US Postal Inspection Service.

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