Whistleblower Group

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...

Low Scores for Government Efforts to Clean Up Medicare/Medicaid Fraud

By Gordon Schnell The Government Accountability Office (GAO), the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, just issued a relatively unflattering report on the government's internal efforts to clean up Medicare and Medicaid fraud.  According to the report, the government makes more than $60 billion in improper Medicare and Medicaid payments every year because of fraud, waste and abuse of the system.  This comes...

Hear No Evil – The Increased Risk for Companies That Ignore or Retaliate Against Whistleblowers

By Marlene Koury Corporate misconduct is at an all-time high, according to a recently-issued report titled Inside the Mind of a Whistleblower, from the Ethics Resource Center (ERC).  The ERC reported that up to 45 percent of U.S. employees said that they had observed misconduct at various levels in the workplace during 2011.  This conduct included falsifying financial reporting information, engaging in...

Show Me the Money – Large Rewards as an Indispensable Piece of the Whistleblower Enforcement System

By Gordon Schnell In yet another corporate attempt to upend the surging success of the American whistleblower system, the US Chamber of Commerce recently proposed a cap on whistleblower rewards.  Under the False Claims Act as well as the recently implemented whistleblower provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, whistleblowers are entitled to between 15% and 30% of any government recovery.  This has...

Shattering the Myth of the Whistleblower as a Rogue and Disloyal Employee

By Gordon Schnell In its recently issued report titled Inside the Mind of a Whistleblower, the Ethics Resource Center (ERC) has made some surprising findings on how whistleblowers behave.  Perhaps the most surprising of all is that virtually none of them   -- a mere 3% -- go directly to the government to report the fraud or misconduct they have witnessed.  Instead, they first work within their company to expose...

Looking for a Few Good Whistleblowers

By Gordon Schnell  Last week, the Justice Department put out a formal call to arms for whistleblowers with inside information on fraud or misconduct relating to residential mortgage-backed securities.  These are those nasty bundles of questionable mortgages that financial institutions for years traded like monopoly money and which ultimately triggered the financial meltdown that began in 2008.  After all of this...