I think the nolanverse has a bit of a plotcave in the artifice of the Coleman Reese arc. Namely that he's the least likely person to actually come across the most damning evidence he tried to use to blackmail Wayne Enterprises.
Case in point: he was an auditor and accountant hired to look at numbers to make sure the estimated value of each company was accurate before a merger was finalized.
The thing about that is, you're not reviewing every job a company has taken on in detail. Mr. Reese was not the head of an auditing team. He was a single auditor, which would suggest his job was pretty straightforward. Examine the revenue streams of each company and compare their revenue to their expenditures, examining if a revenue or expense is ongoing, a single instance, or discontinued, etc.
Even if that meant reading tags on money to identify it it was a military contract, a medical contract, a tech venture, etc wouldn't result in him seeing images of top secret research. So. My thinking is, Mr. Reese would have only seen those images if he went snooping.
And he didn't seem like the kind of man who would have just snooped out of curiosity. He seemed like an opportunist. Someone who made a living stealing sensitive research and selling it, or possibly someone who'd already done that somewhere else, and got recruited to be a spy to avoid penalties with that company.
But since we never see that avenue of corporate espionage play out, I'm inclined to believe that story arc was not intended by the time the movie hit.
Which means Coleman Reese was a very flimsy plot point to hinge an entire story arc on.
A better person would have been one of the contractors Bruce hired to reinforce and expand the Bat cave. Someone who might have figured out where the Batmobile keeps disappearing to, and when Joker goes on air threatening a new death every day until the Batman is unmasked, tries to come forward until the joker announces the hospital threat.
Because while I can definitely see Alfred being forklift operator certified, I still expect there were some projects that required outside help to be done right. Those jobs might have come with airtight NDAs, but they would have still been necessary.
