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Bounties for Wandering Whistleblowers

By Philip M. Berkowitz

Last year, a number of important new developments, judicial and otherwise, expanded the rights of individuals, even those based overseas, to assert whistleblower rights under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Report and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. Namely:

  • In September, the SEC made its largest Dodd-Frank whistleblower bounty award ever ' for $30 million ' to a foreign national who submitted to the SEC from overseas evidence of his employer's alleged unlawful conduct, which occurred entirely overseas.
  • In March, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its groundbreaking decision in Lawson v. FMR, 134 S. Ct. 1158 (2014), expanding Sarbanes-Oxley's whistleblower protection beyond employees of publicly traded companies to employees of company officers and contractors.
  • Sean McKessy, chief of the SEC Office of the Whistleblower, recently vowed to pursue the thousands of cases that have piled up in that agency.
  • The Department of Labor (DOL), for its part, has announced it is seeking, in 2015, an additional $4 million and 27 full-time employees for its whistleblower program.
  • Also in September, Attorney General Eric Holder advocated an increase in the maximum number of permissible whistelblower awards, specifically to incentivize financial fraud whistleblowers. See I. Schuman & J. Lazazzero, “U.S. Attorney General Holder Calls for Increased Bounty Awards for Financial Whistleblowers,” Littler Workplace Policy Update (Sept. 18, 2014, Littler Mendelson, P.C. publication), http://bit.ly/1xysj71.

A Bit of History

Dodd-Frank and SOX provide private causes of action for whistleblowers who suffer retaliation. Both statutes require a plaintiff asserting a whistleblower claim to show that he engaged in protected activity, that he suffered an adverse employment action, and that the adverse action was causally connected to the protected activity.

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