For years people used the term “in a Swiss bank account somewhere” to refer to money that had been hidden overseas where the IRS couldn’t reach it. Taking advantage of offshore bank accounts has long been (and still is) a way for rich people to avoid paying taxes on large…
Calculating and Allocating Awards Before you go about contesting any preliminary determinations, it might help to understand how the SEC goes about calculating its whistleblower awards in the first place. In general, whistleblowers who meet all the requirements are eligible to receive 10%-30% of the monetary sanctions collected by the…
Filing a Claim So, the SEC has taken your information and executed a successful enforcement action worth more than $1 million against the offender. Now what? Once the action has been successfully executed, the Office of the Whistleblower will publish a “Notice of Covered Action” on the SEC’s website, after…
Successful Enforcement It’s not enough to provide information that may or may not lead anywhere. The information provided must lead directly to a successful action against the accused person or entity in order for the whistleblower to be able to collect an award. Of course, this is only the case…
The Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) has been granting a record number of awards to whistleblowers alerting the authorities to securities fraud. To sweeten the deal, the awards (especially lately) tend to be in the tens of millions, and they’re only going to increase along with the amount of recovered monetary…
The ousted founder and former CEO of Orion Energy Systems, Inc., cannot prevail in his federal whistleblowing claim against the company because his complaints to the board did not amount to whistleblowing under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Seventh Circuit recently ruled in considering his appeal. Neal V. founded Orion in…
Whether an airline employee can avail himself of state whistleblower protections currently depends on which federal circuit he finds himself in. He should hope not to be in the Eighth Circuit, which continues to find state whistleblower laws preempted by the federal Airline Deregulation Act (ADA), even where the employee…
A recent case in the Northern District of Illinois, Helfer v. Associated Anesthesiologists of Springfield (2016 WL 183501, addressed what a plaintiff must show to sustain a claim for retaliatory termination under the False Claims Act. Donald H. was an anesthesiologist and partner at Associated Anesthesiologists of Springfield, Ltd. in…
A federal court in Illinois recently shot down an employer’s claim that having signed a HIPAA “privacy policy” deprived an employee of whistleblower protections. In United States ex rel. Cieszynski et al. v. Lifewatch Services, Inc. (2016 WL 2771798), Matthew C. brought a qui tam action accusing his employer, LifeWatch…
Employees who notice something illegal or immoral going on at work are often made to choose between their conscience and their jobs. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform act prohibits employers from retaliating against whistleblowers (those who bring illegal practices to the attention of a regulatory authority), but in practice, these…