Author: Young Law Group

The Supreme Court upheld a verdict for two whistleblowers in its opinion today in State Farm v. U.S. ex rel. Rigsby despite a violation of the False Claims Act seal requirement by their former lawyer in the case. The Supreme Court agreed with the Fifth Circuit and District Court that the text of the False Claims Act does not...

The SEC has announced a $140 million settlement with Weatherford International over the use of deceptive income tax accounting to inflate its earnings. Weatherford is one of the largest oil and natural gas companies internationally and is now a repeat player in settling government investigations. They were fined a few years back by the SEC...

The SEC Enforcement Director, Andrew Ceresney, spoke yesterday about the SEC whistleblower program at the Taxpayers Against Fraud Conference in Washington, D.C. There’s some great information for whistleblowers. Before we identify the takeaways for securities whistleblowers, we thought it worth taking a moment to speak about Taxpayers Against Fraud, an organization where our whistleblower attorneys...

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has published a notice of proposed rulemaking in the Federal Register related to the CFTC whistleblower awards process. The proposed amendments to the regulations on first glance are pro-whistleblower and would be a welcome improvement and clarification to the program’s current regulations.   We’re about to head out for...

Six years after Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act to reform Wall Street and prevent a future financial crisis from developing, the Securities and Exchange Commission is celebrating the success of the financial incentives created for whistleblowers to provide information about suspected violations of federal securities laws. The SEC announced this week that it has paid...

An Australian newspaper over the weekend reported the payment of a reward by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to an SEC whistleblower concerning information about violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) by Australian mining conglomerate BHP Billiton. It is the first public report of a payment to an FCPA whistleblower by the...

Another publicly traded company has been reprimanded by the Securities and Exchange Commission for attempting to thwart its whistleblower program. This time it is BlueLinx Holdings, Inc., a building products distributor which trades on the New York Stock Exchange with a market capitalization of approximately $84 million, which ran afoul of SEC Rule 21F-17. SEC...

Criminal fines and civil forfeitures are collected proceeds under Internal Revenue Code section 7623(b), the mandatory tax whistleblower program, according to a recent decision by the U.S. Tax Court. The opinion paved the way for an award of $17.8 million to a pair of whistleblowers. In the rules for the IRS whistleblower program, the tax agency...