Category: News

Justice Antonin Scalia’s passing on Saturday has been the talk of the political and legal community over the past 48 hours.  Justice Scalia joined the Supreme Court in 1986 after being appointed by President Ronald Reagan. Now, President Obama will have the opportunity to appoint a successor and alter the conservative majority on the Court....

The Internal Revenue Service Whistleblower program has released its annual report to Congress for Fiscal Year 2015. The office awarded just over $103 million to informants for information about tax evasion, nearly double the amount paid in FY 2013 or 2014. Since 2007, the program has now awarded more than $400 million to whistleblowers for...

Over the past few days, we’ve seen the “coco bond carnage” (Bloomberg) play out in newspaper articles as “investors are freaking out” (Business Insider) and the “[m]usic stops for buyers of bank coco debt” (Financial Times). We would be interested in hearing from potential whistleblowers – either insiders who worked at the European banks like...

In an interview on the TRACE Blog published January 26, 2016, Andrew Weissmann, Chief of the DOJ Criminal Division’s Fraud Section, discussed several aspects of its prosecution of FCPA violations. Weissmann has been in the position almost a year now and made several interesting comments. DOJ Commitment Weissmann defended the DOJ’s commitment to FCPA prosecutions even though 2015...

Bloomberg has reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating the accounting of costs and sales at Boeing of two popular aircraft after a tip by an informant to the SEC whistleblower program. In the article, Bloomberg generally suggested that program accounting might allow the aerospace industry to “smooth earnings and obscure potential losses”....

Monsanto, the multinational agriculture company headquartered in the St. Louis area, has agreed to pay the Securities & Exchange Commission an $80 million penalty and retain an independent compliance consultant to resolve charges it misstated company earnings and violated accounting rules. The improper accounting centered around Roundup, an herbicide widely used by both farmers and...

One of the key aspects of President Obama’s proposed Fiscal Year 2017 budget has been an early push for the budgets of Wall Street regulators to double over the next five years. If accepted without changes, the budget for the Securities and Exchange Commission would increase 11% to $1.8 billion and the Commodity Futures Trading...

The Wall Street Journal took aim at the CFTC whistleblower program this weekend, claiming that the agency has spent more than it has paid out since launching in 2011 and has not been able to get tips in the futures and swaps markets. While technically accurate, the criticism fails to consider the length of the entire process,...

This week, the SEC announced the resolution of its FCPA investigation into SAP and SciClone Pharmaceuticals announced its own resolution with the SEC. SciClone agreed to pay $12.8 million to resolve the investigation without admitting or denying wrongdoing. The DOJ declined to continue an investigation into the company as part of the resolution. Last year,...