A group of three whistleblowers were awarded decent sums by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for their efforts to uncover securities law violations made by an investment scheme.
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The SEC’s Office of the Whistleblower today announced that the agency gave an award of $7.0 million split among three whistleblowers for providing information that led to a successful enforcement action. This brings the whistleblower program’s total endowment to approximately $149 million since issuing its first award in 2012. On the other side of the coin, SEC enforcement actions from whistleblower tip-offs have resulted in more than $935 million in financial remedies.
As usual, the U.S. regulator protected the anonymity of the whistleblowers and disclosed no information that could directly or indirectly reveal their identity.
One whistleblower who provided the primary information that helped the SEC expose the shady scheme will get more than $4 million, while the two other whistleblowers that later provided critical information will split nearly $3 million.
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“Whistleblowers played an important role in the success of this case as they helped our agency detect and prosecute a scheme preying on vulnerable investors. Whistleblowers not only helped us open the investigation but provided critical information after the investigation was already underway,” said Jane Norberg, Chief of the SEC’s Office of the Whistleblower.
On top of this, the latest SEC award comes in the midst of Donald Trump’s call to his financial services policy implementation team to work on dismantling the Dodd-Frank Act and replacing it with new policies to encourage economic growth and job creation.
The SEC Office of the Whistleblower Program was created by Congress in 2011, and the program paid out its first award a year later. Under the program, eligible whistleblowers receive between 10 percent and 30 percent of the monetary sanctions collected when they report financial mishandlings of over $1 million. All whistleblower awards are paid from the CFTC Customer Protection Fund established by Congress and financed entirely through monetary sanctions paid to the CFTC by violators of the CEA.
