Archive

The SEC Whistleblower Office is Open for Business

By Gordon Schnell and Marlene Koury With the payment of its first whistleblower reward last week, the SEC has declared loud and clear that its recently created Whistleblower Office is officially open for business.  Click here for SEC press release.   While relatively modest in amount -- only $50,000 for now -- what is particularly notable about the award is that it represented 30 percent of the total amount the...

SEC Continues its Crusade Against Foreign Bribery

By Gordon Schnell The reinvigorated efforts of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to fight foreign bribery continue to pay off.  This week, the SEC announced that the drug giant, Pfizer, has agreed to pay $60 million to settle criminal and civil charges that its subsidiaries bribed foreign officials in Europe and Asia in order to win business there.  Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), it...

Expanding Protections for Antitrust Whistleblowers -- Help is On the Way

By Gordon Schnell  Two U.S. senators this week proposed legislation that would for the first time extend whistleblower protections to those reporting on violations of the antitrust laws.  The bill, introduced by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) as the Criminal Antitrust Anti-Retaliation Act, would amend the Antitrust Criminal Penalties Enforcement and Reform Act (ACPERA).  This...

The IRS Whistleblower Office -- A New Beginning or Just a Lot of Lip Service

By Gordon Schnell Since its inception in 2007, the IRS Whistleblower Office has been subject to some fairly withering attacks.  And for good reason.  It was supposed to revamp the IRS whistleblower system, encouraging tipsters to flood in and help the government identify all of those tax cheats and their billions of dollars in unpaid taxes each year.  The whistleblowers have certainly done their part.  They...

Business is Booming at the SEC Whistleblower Office as Tips Continue to Flood In

By Jason Enzler The SEC’s Whistleblower Office is busy these days as tips continue to stream into the agency.  Thomas Sporkin, the chief of the SEC’s Office of Market Intelligence, the unit that assesses the credibility of these tips, recently stated that the agency is receiving an average of seven tips per day, with about 2 or 3 of them meriting investigation.  Many of these tips are coming from senior...