Voluntarily provide the tip, complaint, or referral to the SEC.The SEC’s whistleblower program provides awards to a wide range of whistleblowers.Īs a general rule, to be eligible for an award, the whistleblower must: If the SEC investigates and pursues the information provided by the whistleblower, and the whistleblower’s original information leads to a successful SEC enforcement action yielding a recovery over $1 million, then an eligible whistleblower may claim a monetary award. The SEC then determines whether the claim is worth pursuing.
Rather, an SEC whistleblower submits a “tip, complaint, or referral” form directly to the SEC apprising the agency of the securities violation(s) at issue. Unlike whistleblowing under the False Claims Act, an SEC whistleblower does not file a lawsuit. How Does the SEC Whistleblower Program Work? Notably, the violation does not need to occur at a publicly traded company, and thus whistleblowers may expose wrongdoing at privately held companies as well. In sum, the SEC whistleblower program covers conduct where some form of federal securities violation is at issue.
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Violations. For example, SEC whistleblowers can raise allegations including (but not limited to) the following: Given that the SEC’s jurisdiction is vast, the potential wrongdoing that falls within the scope of the whistleblower program is similarly broad. The SEC’s Whistleblower Program provides eligible whistleblowers with monetary awards for submitting information relating to a wide range of conduct by companies and individuals. So, if another whistleblower has already apprised the SEC of the same information, then the information would not qualify as “original information.” What Sort of Conduct is Covered by the SEC’s Whistleblower Program? In addition, the SEC must not have already known of the information from some other source. A whistleblower is not required to have first-hand knowledge of the wrongdoing either (e.g., a whistleblower may gain “original information” from social interactions). Chief among them is the requirement that the information must be derived from the whistleblower’s independent knowledge or independent analysis (independent analysis may be based on public information). The SEC whistleblower program defines “original information” to mean that the information must meet certain criteria. Through this public-private partnership, the government has recovered billions of dollars. The SEC Whistleblower Program, enacted through the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, has now paid over $1 billion to whistleblowers who provided the SEC with tips uncovering myriad forms of corporate wrongdoing. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s Whistleblower Program provides potentially sizeable rewards to eligible whistleblowers who submit “original information” to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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