I have been navigating the workplace in hopes of finding a similar situation with a solution, but unfortunately I have had no such luck (perhaps by fault of my own). A friend of mine (lets call them V) recently confronted me about an ethical dilemma they are having and have reached out for my advice, to which I was unsure on how to proceed as well.
V has started a new position at their company, and has gone through several trainings on how to properly conduct their responsibilities and routines. These routines involve recording data that a program outputs. This process can be very tedious and sometimes require several program re-runs to get acceptable values. V has made sure to always perform the tests as directed, as tedious as it may be. Furthermore , V's boss has made it clear that falsifying any data would result in disciplinary action (most likely termination based on other departments incidents). Occasionally, with personnel outage, a higher up member will cover for a member of the team.
In comes the ethical dilemma. By accident V discovered several occasions of their boss doing exactly this, falsifying records which do not align with the recorded program output. (They frequently go through the logs as part of the process to record the data. They had noticed that the boss was able to complete the task much quicker with many fewer attempts and was looking to see if they (V) were doing something wrong, when they discovered the conflicting reports.) V is concerned about retaliation and has heard the old anecdote of HR protects the interests of the company and not the employee. V's boss is also very well liked and well respected by the higherups. V wants to do the right thing, but fears that even if the issue is resolved they will always have a target on their back. Due to the nature of the test, it would be apparent - even if anonymously submitted that it was V who reported it. The program that these values are used for is not life threatening and would not cause harm to anyone involved.
EDIT: To clarify, V's boss recorded a value that was within the acceptable range that was never presented by the program and has no logical way of abstracting it (i.e. rounding)
What is the best way to report this kind of finding? What are the likely impacts to the career/employmeent of V in this case?