Until just over a month ago, the Securities and Exchange Commission had been relatively sparing in its awards this year under the SEC Whistleblower Program, leading many to question whether its support for the program was losing steam.

With the SEC issuing five awards over several days surrounding Labor Day, however, the agency seemed to be signaling it remains firmly behind the program. That signal grew even stronger with the SEC issuing another five awards just before the shutdown, four of them only a few hours before the government went dark.

But this recent wave of awards, coupled with the agency’s other whistleblower activity (and inactivity), actually send a more muddled message on where the SEC really stands with its whistleblower program.

An important contributor to this mixed message is the unusually paltry payouts from the SEC’s recent whistleblower awards. These awards are nowhere near the hundreds of millions of dollars the agency doled out to whistleblowers in each of the past five years. In fact, two of the most recent awards were for no money at all.

This raises the serious specter that the SEC may be shying away from the blockbuster awards that have become a hallmark of the program. These eight and nine-digit sums have galvanized the SEC program and have been a key driver for whistleblowers moving forward, especially given they often put their careers on the line to report fraud to the government.

Further muddying the message is the SEC’s apparent decision...

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