IRS Whistleblower Program Provides Opportunities For Some, Pitfalls For Others
February 19th, 2013
February 2013 The IRS has had a whistleblower program for decades, but it was not widely used and not much was paid to whistleblowers. However, [...]
Whistleblower Systems Articles
Conflicting Rulings About SOX’s Scope Cause Private Company Employees To Stay With DOL Adjudication
October 30th, 2012
October 2012 The Administrative Review Board (ARB) for the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) recently issued a decision regarding the scope of the whistleblower protections [...]
DOL’s ARB Limits SOX & Dodd-Frank Whistleblower Protections To U.S. Employees
June 6th, 2012
February 2012 By a 3-2 vote, the Department of Labor’s Administrative Review Board (ARB) limited the jurisdiction of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) whistleblower protection outside [...]
SOX Whistleblower Protections Again Interpreted Narrowly
August 3rd, 2011
May 2011 The Ninth Circuit took a narrow reading of the whistleblower protections provided under Sarbanes-Oxley, and thereby eliminated the applicability of any whistleblower [...]
SEC Issues Final Rules On Their Whistleblower & Reward Program Under Dodd-Frank
August 1st, 2011
June 2011 The Dodd-Frank Act, which was signed by President Obama on July 21, 2010, includes (in Section 922) a whistleblower program sponsored by the [...]
Employers Should Implement Whistleblower Reporting Changes Because Of The Dodd-Frank Act
November 12th, 2010
November 2010 The Dodd-Frank Act, which was signed by President Obama on July 21, 2010, includes (in Section 922) a whistleblower program sponsored by the [...]
Ninth Circuit Reinstates More Lenient Standard For Whistleblower Protection
August 12th, 2009
Aug 2009 Whistleblowers have had a difficult time obtaining the protection afforded under Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Section 806. This is largely because the Department of Labor (DOL), [...]
DOL Continues To Ignore And Rewrite Sox’s Whistleblower Law
September 17th, 2008
September 2008 According to records maintained by the Department of Labor (DOL), the government has ruled in favor of whistleblowers 17 times out of 1,273 [...]
Nonprofit Organizations Need A Whistleblower Reporting Mechanism
February 12th, 2008
February 2008 The IRS adopted a substantially revised Form 990 that calls for significantly expanded corporate governance disclosures. A charity’s Form 990 is publicly available, [...]
U.S. Supreme Court Makes Recovery By Whistleblower Plaintiffs More Difficult
April 12th, 2007
Apr 2007 The Supreme Court ruled that a qui tam informant cannot receive compensation if he lacked “direct and independent knowledge of the information upon [...]
Fraud Study Says Whistleblowers Are The Most Common Means Of Identifying Fraud, But This Comes At A High Personal Cost When Whistleblower Anonymity Is Not Maintained
February 14th, 2007
February 2007 A February 2007 study by three professors looks at 230 of the U.S.’s largest public company frauds disclosed between 1996 and 2004. The [...]
IRS Raises Stakes on Tax Whistleblower Claims
February 12th, 2007
Feb 2007 The Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006, signed into law on December 20, 2006, amended the Internal Revenue Code to provide [...]
Best Practices In Whistleblower Systems
November 14th, 2005
November 2005 A whistleblower hotline is probably the easiest and least expensive means available to improve corporate governance. Waste, fraud, and the abuse of [...]
Handling Whistleblowers is Tricky
October 13th, 2005
Oct 2005 There are hidden complexities in the implementation of a seemingly simple provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (“SOX”). Because of this hidden complexity, many [...]
Regulators Find Whistleblower Hotlines To Be Effective…You (Or Your Clients) Should Be Talking To These Employees First
August 12th, 2004
Aug 2004 Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) Section 301(4) requires all public companies to establish a means to collect, retain, and resolve claims regarding accounting, internal accounting [...]
Fraud Survey Highlights The Value Of Whistleblower Systems
July 14th, 2003
July 2003 Wilmer Cutler & Pickering and PriceWaterhouseCoopers recently released a survey that analyzes economic crimes caused by internal corporate fraud. The results should [...]