NeuStar Inc. paid a fine of $180,000<\/strong> for putting restrictive language in severance agreements.<\/p>\nThe SEC found that NeuStar was \u201croutinely entering into severance agreements that contained a broad non-disparagement clause forbidding former employees from engaging with the SEC and other regulators \u2018in any communication that disparages, denigrates, maligns or impugns\u2019 the company.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
In the second case Oklahoma City-based SandRidge Energy Inc. agreed to pay a fine of $1.4 million.<\/strong> Even though the company reviewed their severance arrangements several times after new Dodd\/Frank rules were put in place, they continued to include language \u201crestricting\u201d former employees from blowing the whistle to regulators.<\/p>\nThe SEC found that \u201cSandRidge fired an internal whistleblower who kept raising concerns about the process used by SandRidge to calculate its publicly reported oil-and-gas reserves.\u201d<\/p>\n
The message is clear \u2013 Don\u2019t try to limit a former employee\u2019s ability to blow the whistle! Instead, take steps to investigate the matter!<\/p>\n
As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome!<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By: George M. Wilson & Carol A. Stacey On December 19 and 20, 2016, as a year-end reminder, the SEC\u2019s 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. … Continue reading Whistleblower Reminders<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[143],"tags":[48,101,111,32,67,107,25,52,98,132,180,200,73,85,121,47,199,99,133,61],"coauthors":[163],"class_list":["post-823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hot-topic","tag-accounting","tag-aicpa","tag-am-law","tag-audit","tag-fasbiasb","tag-financial-accounting","tag-financial-accounting-standards-advisory-committee","tag-form-10-k","tag-gaap","tag-internal-auditing","tag-lease-standard","tag-neustar","tag-non-gaap","tag-pcaob","tag-pli-free-fridays","tag-revenue-recognition","tag-sandridge-energy","tag-seci","tag-sox","tag-whistleblower"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seciblog.pli.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seciblog.pli.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seciblog.pli.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seciblog.pli.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seciblog.pli.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/seciblog.pli.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seciblog.pli.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seciblog.pli.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seciblog.pli.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=823"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seciblog.pli.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}