Author: Young Law Group

A Record Award A media outlet, Financial Planning, is predicting that a pair of SEC whistleblowers will share an award of approximately $70.6 million out of the $307 million in regulatory fines against JPMorgan in 2015. Another outlet, Advisor Hub, put the number at $61 million instead. Either award amount would be the largest in...

Corporate Whistleblowing in 2017 The Chief of the SEC’s Office of the Whistleblower, Jane Norberg, and the Director of the CFTC Whistleblower Office, Christopher Ehrman, spoke recently at the Practicing Law Institute’s program on June 28, 2017, titled Corporate Whistleblowing in 2017. Their comments covered a wide range of hot topics in the field of...

U.S. Tax Court Denied Serial Whistleblower Anonymity The Tax Court has reminded IRS whistleblowers in a recent decision that the ability to proceed anonymously is not absolute. On June 28, 2017, the U.S. Tax Court denied an anonymous proceeding to Whistleblower 14377-16W after weighing the public interest in knowing who is using the Tax Court...

Whistleblower Retaliation Protections The Supreme Court will next term review a whistleblower retaliation lawsuit, Somers v. Digital Realty Trust, Inc., to determine whether the anti-retaliation protections of the Dodd-Frank Act protects employees who report misconduct internally. The Ninth Circuit, in a split decision, determined that the Dodd-Frank Act protected the employee from retaliation as a...

The Dangers of CHOICE Act The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday approved banking reforms in the Financial CHOICE Act of 2017 that would, if adopted, “gut many of the key banking reforms implemented after the financial crisis” according to a CNBC article. Apart from the overall impact on the Dodd-Frank Act, the law makes...

Proposed IRS Whistleblower Retaliation Protections Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Wyden have proposed the IRS Whistleblower Improvements Act of 2017 in the U.S. Senate today. If adopted, the law will provide for (1) enhanced communications between the Internal Revenue Service and whistleblowers, and (2) anti-retaliation protections for tax whistleblowers. Both would be significant improvements to the...

CFTC Whistleblower Program Improves The CFTC has issued final rules based on its previously proposed changes to the CFTC whistleblower program. The changes have left the core of the program intact while strengthening the whistleblower retaliation protections, harmonizing the rules with the SEC program and adding transparency to the process for reward claims. Young Law...

Fake News on Stocks is Real Last month, the SEC warned investors about companies using fake news to drive up stock prices. In conjunction with this warning, the SEC charged 27 public companies, firms and writers with fraud for failing to disclose paid promotion, using multiple pseudonyms for publications about the same stock and/or using...

Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the False Claims Act US Attorney General Jeff Sessions reaffirmed the Justice Department’s commitment to enforce the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) spoke last Monday in a speech at the Ethics and Compliance Initiative Annual Conference. Statements by President Trump before running for office ridiculing the anti-bribery law had put...