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Ted Siedle is the rare SEC whistleblower who allows us to put a face to the name.

Posted  May 24, 2019

After two years of waiting, the recipient of what was the largest whistleblower award to date under the SEC Whistleblower Program when it was first announced in 2017, was finally paid by the SEC. This week, he received his share of a $50 million reward to two whistleblowers for exposing conflicts of interest at JP Morgan that led to a $267 million fine by the SEC. Last year, the whistleblower also received $30 million from the CFTC Whistleblower Reward Program, that agency’s largest award ever, for exposing the same misconduct.

But whistleblower Edward “Ted” Siedle is noteworthy for another reason: We know who he is.

Because of the frequency of retaliation, or just a sense of privacy, most whistleblowers avoid publicity. Some, like whistleblowers under the False Claims Act, do not have a choice; when their cases end, they will be revealed publicly. Whistleblowers in programs like the SEC, CFTC, and IRS, though, can take advantage of the strong confidentiality protections and keep their identities out of the public eye forever.

Ted Siedle, however, elected to reveal himself to the public in a piece in Forbes not long after the SEC’s award was announced. This does the public a real service. By seeing a face and reading a personal story, especially one as laudable as Ted’s, people can see that whistleblowers are real people. Typically, they are people with integrity who have found themselves in a situation in which someone or some company is breaking the rules, and they feel compelled to step forward to right that wrong.

Having notable whistleblowers in the public eye helps reinforce the growing public acknowledgement that we owe whistleblowers a debt. They are not troublemakers; they are the ones who act to stop the trouble. That’s why we devote our careers to helping them, and it’s why whistleblower reward programs are so critical to ensuring that everyone plays fair. Thank you, Ted, for letting us see the human face behind the successes of the SEC whistleblower program and, in so doing, encouraging other whistleblowers to utilize the SEC program.

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Tagged in: Anonymity, CFTC Whistleblower Reward Program, Importance of Whistleblowers, SEC Whistleblower Reward Program, Whistleblower Rewards,