Whistleblower Law Blog

TweetThe U.S. Department of Labor’s Administrative Review Board (ARB) revisited a long-running case, once again ruling against Halliburton, the oilfield services giant, for retaliating against a whistleblower who reported accounting irregularities to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The ARB awarded financial executive Anthony Menendez $30,000 in damages, plus costs and lawyers’ fees.

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TweetOn December 20, 2012, whistleblower lawyer and managing principal of The Employment Law Group, P.C., R. Scott Oswald, published an article on the a recent U.S. Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) settlement that may encourage more enforcement actions against dark pool trading. According to Mr. Oswald, “dark pools facilitate large trades off the main exchanges” and “because [...]

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TweetThe Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) this month released its “Annual Report on the Dodd-Frank Whistleblower Program,” which announced that in fiscal year 2012 the agency received a total of 3,001 tips from all fifty states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and from forty-nine foreign countries. Under the new program, the first reward was issued on [...]

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TweetThe Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced last week that the first payout from the new SEC Whistleblower Program will be awarded to a whistleblower that helped the government stop a multi-million dollar fraud. The whistleblower will receive nearly $50,000, or thirty percent of the amount collected by the SEC. While the SEC did not [...]

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TweetR. Scott Oswald, managing principal of The Employment Law Group® law firm, was recently interviewed by Law360 and provided commentary on a report that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) may have inadvertently exposed the identity of a corporate whistleblower.  Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that the SEC had unintentionally revealed the [...]

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TweetR. Scott Oswald, managing principal of The Employment Law Group® recently published an article in The Washington Post discussing new expansions of employee rights in the areas of whistleblower protection and wage and hour law. In the piece, Mr. Oswald discussed recent developments in employee protection law that, if ignored, could result in penalties and [...]

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TweetAccording to a report this week in the Financial Times, the chief of the Securities Exchange Commission’s new Whistleblower Office, Sean McKessey, stated that the SEC has “received notes, audio recordings of conversations and simple recollections” of securities fraud and other wrongdoing since a new whistleblower reward program promising rewards for whistleblowers began last year. [...]

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TweetKhaled Asadi, a former General Electric executive based in Iraq, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Houston, Texas, against General Electric (GE) on February 3, 2012, alleging that the company retaliated against him after he raised concerns about potential internal corruption. Asadi states in his complaint, that he was coerced to step down from [...]

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TweetLast month, Louisiana Municipal Police Employees’ Retirement System (“LAMPERS”) filed a securities class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation (BNY Mellon) under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The lawsuit filed by LAMPERS, discussed in an article published by [...]

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TweetLast week, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Stiefel Laboratories Inc. (Stiefel Labs), a subsidiary of GlaxoSmithKline PLC, and the company’s former chairman and chief executive officer Charles Stiefel with defrauding employees and company shareholders by allegedly making stock buybacks at significantly undervalued prices. The SEC alleges that Stiefel Labs failed to report certain [...]

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TweetThe Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged North Bethesda resident Garfield M. Taylor and his associates with running a multi-million dollar Ponzi scheme in which he promised investors annual returns of about 20 percent with little or no risk.  Instead, Taylor lost investors money on highly risky options and used funds from new investors to [...]

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TweetThe SEC Whistleblower Reward Program signed into law last year under theDodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is effective as from today, August 12, 2011. As the U.S. economy continues to struggle, compounded by a lowered Standard & Poor’s rating that sent the New York Stock Exchange and European markets spiraling, corporate whistleblower cases [...]

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TweetThe Securities and Exchange Commission is being praised by whistleblower advocates for issuing finalized rules that will effectively incentivize employees to disclose fraud and other securities law violations.  The Dodd-Frank Act – enacted in July of 2010 – established a new whistleblower program within the SEC, requiring the SEC to reward whistleblowers who provide original [...]

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TweetThe Securities and Exchange Commission is receiving praise from whistleblower advocates for issuing finalized rules that do not require whistleblowers to report fraudulent or illegal activity internally to their employer, but instead allow whistleblowers to blow the whistle direct to the SEC. The Dodd-Frank Act established a new whistleblower program at the SEC, requiring the [...]

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TweetInvestment News reported that Rep. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y. circulated draft legislation that would require a whistleblower to first report fraud through an internal compliance program as a prerequisite to recovering an award before the whistleblower would be eligible for a reward from the SEC under the whistleblower reward provision of the Dodd-Frank Act.  TELG opposes [...]

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TweetInvestmentNews.com reported that Rep. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y., presented legislation that would require whistleblowers to first report fraud trough their employer’s internal compliance program before they would be eligible for a reward from the SEC under the Dodd-Frank Act. During a House Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets hearing, the drafters related a concern that whistlblowers [...]

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TweetThe U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York issued a good decision for whistleblowers providing much needed clarity on the scope of the anti-retaliation provision in Section 922(h), which prohibits retaliation for the following acts: (1) “providing information to the Commission in accordance with this section;” (ii) “initiating, testifying in, or assisting in any [...]

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TweetLaura Schreier wrote an article in Banker & Tradesmen titled Dodd-Frank Weighs Heavily on Mass. Whistleblower Case in which she discusses the recent U.S. District Court ruling in Pezza v. Investors Capital Corp. that Section 922(e) of the Dodd-Frank Act applies to pending cases.  Section 922(e) bans pre-dispute agreements in employment contracts that require Sarbanes-Oxley whistleblowers [...]

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TweetThe Employment Law Group® attorney Jason Zuckerman was quoted in an Ammerican Bar Association article titled SEC is Giving Whistle-blower Protection One Last Lick: “After the Bernard Madoff scandal broke the SEC had a lot of egg on its face,” says Jason Zuckerman, principal of [T]he Employment Law Group, a Washington, D.C.-based firm that represents [...]

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TweetIn an article in the Fiscal Times discussing the SEC’s proposed rules implementing the Dodd-Frank Act’s whistleblower provisions, Jason Zuckerman, an attorney at The Employment Law Group® law firm, asserted that all whistleblowers should be permitted to report fraud directly to the SEC: A key point of contention is whether the whistleblower should be required [...]

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TweetIn an article about the whistleblower provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act, the Wall Street Journal quotes Jason Zuckerman, a principal at The Employment Law Group®, regarding defense counsels’ complaint that SEC rules do not prevent a whistleblower from both collecting an award under the SEC whistleblower reward program and also seeking compensation through a securities [...]

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TweetIn an article in today’s Wall Street Journal and in a Wall Street Journal blog post, Jason Zuckerman, a principal at The Employment Law Group®, was quoted regarding new regulations proposed by the SEC for its Whistleblower Reward Program: “Whistleblowers should not be required to go to their companies first,” said Jason Zuckerman….  [He] didn’t [...]

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TweetA sign that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is seriously committed to routing out corporate fraud, the SEC has set aside $450 million to fund its whistleblower reward program, which was established under The Dodd-Frank Act.  The SEC must reward whistleblowers who file complaints that lead to the recovery of funds.  The Dodd-Frank Act [...]

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TweetAccording to the Star Tribune, former Ameriprise branch manager Michael Loscalso filed a federal lawsuit alleging he was fired in retaliation for reporting fraud and other violations of regulatory rules.  Under the Dodd-Frank Act, whistleblowers similar to Loscalso are entitled to protection from retaliation and may even be entitled to a monetary reward in return [...]

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TweetAccording to an article in the New York Times, a trader named Arthur Schlobohm detected a $160 million Ponzi scheme run by Trevor Cook.   As a result of Mr. Schlobohm’s courageous whistleblowing, Mr. Cook was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to pay $158 million in restitution. Mr. Schlobohm says that because regulators [...]

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