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...
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...
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...
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...
A closely watched case out of New York concerning the reverse false claims provision of the False Claims Act settled last week. The case was groundbreaking not for its size (it settled for just $2.95 million) but because it was the first involving the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that federal health care fund recipients return overpayments within...
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...