Whistleblower Law Blog

TweetJudge T. S. Ellis, III denied Xe Services LLC’s motion to dismiss a whistleblower lawsuit, alleging the company defrauded the government by overcharging for its security services.  Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater, came to notoriety for its controversial government contracts to supply private security in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Former employees Melan and Brad Davis, [...]

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TweetJudge Robert Sweet of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York stated in the case of Sharkey v. J.P. Morgan Chase that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) protects whistleblowers who report fraudulent activity by their employer or by third parties such as clients and business partners: The legislative history concerning the [...]

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TweetThe Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recently issued new rules that now permit whistleblowers to be rewarded for reporting a company’s illegal tax scheme that leads to ill-gotten tax refunds or credits.  Under the IRS’s whistleblower program, whistleblowers can be rewarded up to 30% of the funds recouped in return for reporting tax fraud.  For more [...]

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TweetThe U.S. Department of Labor Administrative Review Board (ARB) held in the case of Williams v. American Airlines that a written warning or counseling session conducted by an employer is presumptively an adverse employment action against an employee where: it is considered discipline by policy or practice, it is routinely used as the first step [...]

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TweetThe U.S. Merit System Protections Board (MSPB) ordered whistleblower Teresa Chambers reinstated to her former position as Chief of the U.S. Park Police (USPP) and compensated her for over six years of lost wages.  While under pressure from Debbie Weatherly, a staff member of the House of Representatives Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, the U.S. Department of [...]

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TweetThe U.S. Department of Labor held that Metro North Commuter Railroad Co. retaliated against a whistleblower who reported an injury and filed a complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and ordered Metro North to expunge the whistleblower’s records of any retaliatory reviews, pay $75,000 in punitive damages to the whistleblower, pay $5,500 [...]

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TweetToday President Obama has signed the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), which imposes stricter food safety standards and grants the Food and Drug Administration greater authority to regulate tainted food.  The FMSA was prompted in part by numerous instances of fatal food contamination that revealed insufficient regulation and oversight of food production, including outbreaks [...]

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TweetIn Bonds v. Leavitt, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed the lower court’s grant of summary judgment, holding that Dr. Duane Bonds’s disclosure to a supervisor that the National Institute of Health (NIH) unlawfully retained cell lines created from the blood of participants in a clinical trial without their consent [...]

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Tweet60 Minutes interviewed former GlaxoSmithKline employee Cheryl Eckard whose reports to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) led to a federal investigation of drug maker GlaxoSmithKline and to a False Claims Act lawsuit netting Eckard $96 million.  In 2002, Eckard led a quality assurance team to evaluate a GlaxoSmithKline subsidiary’s factory located in Cidra, Puerto [...]

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