Tag Archives: Whistleblower

Learn About Recent Whistleblower Developments

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By: George M. Wilson & Carol A. Stacey

 

We have done several posts about whistleblowing and the related SOX and Dodd-Frank whistle blower regimens. It is hard to overstate the importance of whistleblowers in the SEC’s enforcement efforts.
On April 25, 2017, the SEC announced a $4 million payout to a whistleblower who provided industry-specific experience and expertise to the staff as they conducted their investigation. In that release they also announced that whistleblower payouts now total approximately $153 million!
Keeping abreast of whistleblowing developments is an important part of governance and compliance.   To help in this process we are offering our Corporate Whistleblowing program on June 28. This program will provide in-depth perspectives on recent regulatory and legal developments, including:

  • What direction the federal whistleblower protection programs will likely take under the new administration
  • What to expect in case law and regulatory enforcement developments in the coming year
  • Best practices in responding to whistleblower reports
  • Key ethical considerations in conducting internal investigations of issues raised by whistleblowers.

 

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome!

Whistleblower Reminders

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By: George M. Wilson & Carol A. Stacey

 

On December 19 and 20, 2016, as a year-end reminder, the SEC’s Enforcement Division announced two more cases to emphasize that companies MUST NOT do anything to impede employees from blowing the whistle.

You can find a lot more background about this issue in this post.

In the first case NeuStar Inc. paid a fine of $180,000 for putting restrictive language in severance agreements.

The SEC found that NeuStar was “routinely entering into severance agreements that contained a broad non-disparagement clause forbidding former employees from engaging with the SEC and other regulators ‘in any communication that disparages, denigrates, maligns or impugns’ the company.” The agreements were structured harshly. Departed employees would lose all but $100 of their severance pay if they violated the agreement. This language impeded at least one former employee from contacting the SEC.

In the second case Oklahoma City-based SandRidge Energy Inc. agreed to pay a fine of $1.4 million. Even though the company reviewed their severance arrangements several times after new Dodd/Frank rules were put in place, they continued to include language “restricting” former employees from blowing the whistle to regulators.

The SEC found that “SandRidge fired an internal whistleblower who kept raising concerns about the process used by SandRidge to calculate its publicly reported oil-and-gas reserves.”

The message is clear – Don’t try to limit a former employee’s ability to blow the whistle! Instead, take steps to investigate the matter!

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome!

More Whistleblower News and a Warning from the SEC

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In a recent post we discussed the “transformative effect” the SEC’s Whistleblower Program has had on SEC enforcement and reviewed the news that the SEC has now paid out more than $100 million to whistleblowers. We also, in an earlier post, walked-through both the Dodd-Frank and the SOX whistleblower programs and discussed some of their differences and similarities.

The most important thread running through all of this is the importance of whistleblowers in the detection and prevention of financial reporting fraud. The SEC’s Whistleblower Program affords “gatekeepers” a robust process for speaking out when they see something that isn’t right. The program is important in the detection of financial reporting fraud and is becoming an ever more important aspect of the SEC’s Enforcement program.

An important part of this program is sending messages to companies that they cannot act to harm whistleblowers. On two occasions thus far the SEC has acted strongly to punish companies who have sought to impede or retaliate against whistleblowers. The most recent case, in the words of the SEC, involved “firing an employee with several years of positive performance reviews because he reported to senior management and the SEC that the company’s financial statements might be distorted.”

The company paid a fine of half a million dollars.

Whistleblower situations are never simple. The issues involved are always grey. Whistleblowers can sometimes challenge areas where management has tried to make good decisions in complex situations. Loyalty is always an issue when someone blows the whistle. But even with these challenges the message from the SEC is clear; don’t retaliate when someone blows the whistle. Instead take steps to appropriately investigate and resolve the issues!

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.

$100 Million in Whistleblower Awards!

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Way back in April of 2015 we did a post about whistleblowers and the upside financial risk in blowing the whistleblowing to the SEC. The Sarbanes-Oxley whistleblower process requires an anonymous path to the audit committee, but the Dodd-Frank process, which is direct to the SEC, is the whistleblower path that can result in financial rewards.

 

This week the SEC announced that awards under this program have now exceeded $100 million. This happened after the recent payment of the program’s second largest award, $22 million.

 

To add a bit of focus, in the related press release, Enforcement Division Director Andrew Ceresney said:

 

“The SEC whistleblower program has had a transformative impact on the agency, enabling us to bring high quality enforcement cases quicker using fewer resources,” said Andrew Ceresney, Director of the SEC Division of Enforcement. “The ultimate goal of our whistleblower program is to deter securities violations and paying more than $100 million in whistleblower awards demonstrates the value that whistleblowers have added to our enforcement program.”

 

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome!

A Bit of Perspective about Clawbacks in the News

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If you are involved in SEC reporting, you have likely been hearing about clawbacks of executive compensation. The SEC, as required by Dodd/Frank, has proposed a new rule about clawbacks. You can see the SEC’s press release about the proposed rule at:

www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/2015-136.html

The press release also has a good summary of the proposal and a link to the text of the proposed rule. (The link is near the top of the press release on the right side of the page.)

This rule proposal has created a fair amount of commentary and discussion, as anyone would expect.

That said, courtesy of Section 304 of SOX, clawbacks have been in play before this proposed rule. And this SOX provision has some teeth. Diebold Corporation, in the wake of a settled accounting fraud enforcement action, was required to clawback compensation from its CEO. Here is an interesting quote from the press release announcing the various enforcements:

“The complaint does not allege that (the CEO) engaged in the fraud.”

You can read the release at:

www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/2010/lr21543.htm

So, what is the reason that Dodd/Frank requires more rule making about clawbacks? One of the principal differences concerning clawbacks between Dodd/Frank and SOX is that SOX requires clawbacks when a restatement arises from accounting fraud.

Dodd/Frank moves things to a higher level because it will require clawbacks for any material restatement, regardless of cause. So even an unintentional error will trigger a clawback requirement.

In a sense, this is a bit like the SOX whistleblower hotline compared to the Dodd/Frank whistleblower hotline. SOX requires an anonymous hotline to the audit committee, Dodd/Frank goes a step further and created the anonymous hotline directly to the SEC.

As always, your thoughts and reactions are welcome!

 

The Whistleblower’s Saga

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Whistleblowers are much in the news. With stories ranging from Jim Marchese of “Real Housewives of New Jersey” fame collecting his second whistleblower legal settlement, to the SEC announcing a $1 million dollar whistleblower payout to a compliance officer, the volume of whistleblower activity is clearly increasing.

(The SEC Release is at:

www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/2015-73.html )

Whistleblowers clearly play a key role in the detection of fraud. The SEC’s Office of the Whistleblower says: “Assistance and information from a whistleblower who knows of possible securities law violations can be among the most powerful weapons in the law enforcement arsenal of the Securities and Exchange Commission”.

If you would like to get to the story of how blowing the whistle affected one person’s life and career, skip to the links at the end of this entry. But first, here is some background about how regulators have tried to create paths for whistleblowers.

Congress has built ways for whistleblowers to do what their label says, blow the whistle when they find something that is wrong, a major focus in the efforts to combat fraud.

The Sarbanes-Oxley act created a whistleblower’s hotline to the audit committee and required that whistleblowers be able to blow the whistle anonymously. The Dodd-Frank Act created a separate incentivized hotline directly to the SEC. A whistleblower using the Dodd-Frank hotline can also remain anonymous and may even be entitled to cash rewards if the matter about which they blow the whistle results in penalties against the company.

Importantly, companies are not allowed to try and restrict employees in blowing the whistle. This is an important enough issue that the SEC has enforced against companies and levied fines when companies try to limit how employees can contact the SEC. A very recent example is against KBR’s use of a confidentiality agreement containing overly restrictive language, summarized at:

www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/2015-54.html#.VRw2AzbD_cs

You can learn more about the Dodd-Frank hotline and the SEC’s Office of the Whistleblower at:

www.sec.gov/whistleblower

One would think with all this legislative and SEC support being a whistleblower is becoming an easier path to walk. However, it is still true that few events in a persons professional career are more stressful and disruptive than blowing the whistle.

Marketplace and Propublica have put together an interesting study of how one whistleblower’s path unfolded. It is a great example with lots of gray issues, a prolonged period of uncertainty, and many other complications. You can read and hear about it at:

www.marketplace.org/topics/business/whistleblowers-tale-how-accountant-took-halliburton

www.propublica.org/article/the-whistleblowers-tale-how-an-accountant-took-on-halliburton