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Supreme Court Declines To Broaden Whistleblower Protections (reuters.com)
The U.S. Supreme Court this week refused to broaden protections for corporate insiders who call out misconduct, ruling they must take claims of wrongdoing to the Securities and Exchange Commission in order to be shielded against retaliation. From a report: The justices ruled 9-0 in favor of Digital Realty Trust, throwing out a lawsuit brought against the California-based real estate trust by a fired former employee who had reported alleged wrongdoing only internally and not to the SEC. The 2010 Wall Street reform law known as the Dodd-Frank Act is unambiguous in offering no protection from retaliation such as firing or demotion to employees who report claims of securities law violations only in-house, the court ruled.
...unless the perpetrator is rich and white, then it's "snitches get stitches!"
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Good to know, report it quickly to the SEC if you want whisleblower protections. And if you wait until your fired, you prob won't be protected.
Maybe this will make people report the crimes quicker.
Report it quickly to the SEC if you want the SOX whistleblower protection. If you wait on reporting it, you may not get whistleblower protections for waiting too long.
Maybe this will make people report crimes quicker and not wait until they are fired for a lawsuit, screwing over investors.
https://www.sec.gov/whistleblo...
You're absolutely right. However, the Supreme Court is not the proper venue for that. It's the responsibility of the Legislative and Executive branches.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
As part of the incentive for whistleblowers to come forward, Dodd-Frank's bounty provisions award 10-30% of the money recovered from a securities violation to the whistleblower that first reported the violation to the SEC, for sanctions of $1 million or more.
If the employee doesn't think the situation is clear-cut enough to have a shot at cashing in on that bounty and yet chooses to raise it internally in the company, there's no reason the government should be in the position of protecting their job. To do otherwise would at the very least create a perverse incentive for employees to try to blackmail their employers over conduct they know or suspect isn't really a SEC violation but will cost the company a lot of time and money to defend to reach that result.
This was actually the worst ruling the private sector could get. Now it is explicit that a corporation cannot rely on its employees to in any way report errors or criminal activity by other employees to get in front of an SEC violation. Think that through for a moment. There is now a disincentive for internal reporting. If I was an owner or board member of any kind of financial institution, I would be pissed! Why it's bad for workers seems obvious.
The headline is misleading -- it was Congress that wrote the law, where the term "whistleblower" is specifically defined to only include those who report misconduct to the SEC. The Supreme Court simply confirmed that we are governed by the law as written.
Note that elsewhere in Dodd–Frank (in the part dealing with reporting to the CFPB) and in Sorbanes–Oxley whistleblowers are defined differently, so that even those that only report misconduct internally are protected.