Category: News

Beige Volkswagen Beetle, representing the $4 Billion Fine for Volkswagen and NHTSA Whistleblower Rules

One Year Later, No NHTSA Whistleblower Rules Announcement

No NHTSA Whistleblower Rules Yet When Congress passed the Motor Vehicle Safety Whistleblower Act as part of the FAST Act last December, it gave the Transportation Department 18 months to implement the regulations for the new whistleblower statute. A year later, there has been no public notice soliciting feedback on the new rules. On one...
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Man Wearing Black Denim Pants With Carrying Hammer on Holster, representing permanent whistleblower protections for contractors

Permanent Whistleblower Protections For Employees of Federal Contractors, Subcontractors: 114th Congress Public Law 261

Permanent Whistleblower Protections A bill sponsored by Senator Claire McCaskill to make permanent a pilot program applying whistleblower protections to contractors, subcontractors, grant recipients, and subgrantees has been passed by the House and Senate. It applies the program’s protection from retaliation to nearly all civilian employees except for the intelligence community. The pilot program was...
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Courthouse with columns, representing Department of Justice (DOJ) and SEC Enforcement

Supreme Court Upholds Insider Trading Conviction in Salman

The Supreme Court issued its decision in Salman v. United States today, the first insider trading case to reach the Justices in more than 20 years. The Supreme Court upheld the standard from its prior ruling, Dirks v. SEC, 463 U.S. 646 (1983) and concluded that a tipper personally benefits from a gift of confidential information to a...
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Close-up Photo of the Stock Market, representing IRS Whistleblower Complaints

Another Example of the SEC Accounting Fraud Pursuit: Weatherford

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...
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Person Holding a Black Digital Tablet, representing Fake News on Stocks

The SEC Enforcement Director Speaks on the SEC Whistleblower Program

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...
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Selective Focus Photography of Wheat Field, representing Commodities for the CFTC and the CFTC Whistleblower Program

CFTC Proposes Whistleblower Program Changes

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...
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Close-up of United States Currency, representing The Hefty High Price of Attempted Whistleblower Retaliation, SEC, and whistleblower rewards

SEC Whistleblower Program Tops $100 Million in Payouts

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...
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Stylish modern building and arch bridge crossing harbor against cloudy sundown sky, representing whistleblower protections in australia

First FCPA Whistleblower Award Revealed

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...
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