The B.C. Securities Commission has granted its first “whistleblower award” to a tipster who provided information about suspected misconduct.

Commission deputy-director of enforcement Mark Hilford said Tuesday that the whistleblower received $25,000, although he wouldn’t provide more details about the case to protect the person’s identity and the investigation.

Hilford said the fact a payment has been made before a hearing is “really what distinguishes our program from all the others.”

“Other programs, they don’t pay until the hearing is done, and they’ve won, and the big fines been issued and paid. Then they reward a whistleblower,” Hilford said. “So it highlights the unique nature of our particular program.”

The securities commission launched the whistleblower program in November 2023 to increase the number and quality of public tips about investment fraud and other forms of market misconduct.

Hilford said that after the first year of the program, overall tips from the public were up 33 per cent, with 255 specific whistleblower tips on top of all the others received.

“We were pretty happy with that. We also went back and did a sort of a quality assessment of all the tips we got in that same time period, and we had 60 per cent graded as either good, very good, or excellent.”

He expects more payouts to be made now that the program is in full swing and investigations into other whistleblower tips are underway.

Financial awards range from $1,000 to a maximum of $500,000,...

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