Since the economic collapse began in 2008, GAP has received an influx of banking and financial institution whistleblowers’ requests for assistance – including from employees working for contractors providing compliance services – that continue to this day. Allegations include bank officials repeatedly making misleading statements to regulators, reporters and the public at large. Potentially worse, whistleblowers supervising third-party (supposedly independent) remediation efforts at these institutions have stated that many of these programs are operating in bad faith.
Banking Sector Accountability: Understanding and Handling the Complex ‘SOX Plus One’ Whistleblower Claim, a new “best practices” report being released today by GAP and authored by GAP contract attorneys Thad Guyer and Melissa Koven, aims to inform legal counsel for whistleblowers about how to navigate these types of future claims – not only under protection laws, but also under federal statutes that can provide financial rewards to clients. The report is supplemented with practical PowerPoint slides.
A term in the report’s title, “SOX Plus One,” refers to a whistleblower who not only seeks a remedy under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act for employment retaliation, but also any financial reward that may be available under a federal statute. These include, as detailed at length in the report, the SEC bounty provisions contained within the Dodd-Frank Act; the federal False Claims Act; the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989; and the Financial Institutions Anti-Fraud Enforcement Act of 1990. A central aim of the paper and corresponding slides is to educate whistleblowers and their lawyers to analyze, at the earliest stages, both the employment protections and bounty rewards which may be involved in these financial sector cases.