Record SEC Award Goes To Foreign Whistleblower

Four of the 14 whistleblowers the SEC has rewarded under the Dodd-Frank Act have gone to foreign citizens, including last week’s record-setting $30-$35 million award for “an ongoing fraud that would have been very difficult to detect,” the agency said. This underscores the agency’s increasing reliance on whistleblowers from outside the U.S. – in fiscal year 2013, the SEC received whistleblower tips from 55 countries, including Brazil, Russia, India, and China. “The advent of lottery-sized whistleblower awards makes it all the more important for companies to establish robust and effective compliance programs to prevent, detect and resolve problems early, before they escalate into serious violations of the federal securities laws,” attorneys with Fenwick & West LLP write.