On May 5, 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) announced that it had awarded a single whistleblower $279 million. This is the largest award made under the SEC’s Whistleblower Program by a long shot – more than double the now-second highest award, which stands at $114 million. In fact, this award is greater than all of the awards the SEC paid out to whistleblowers in 2022 combined (which totaled $229 million).
I. Three Years of Historic Whistleblower Awards
This recent award is also the largest award in history under any whistleblower program. This makes three years in a row where there has been a new record-breaking whistleblower award. In 2021, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (“CFTC”) awarded just under $200 million to a single whistleblower who assisted the agency in its sprawling investigation of the LIBOR scandal. At the time, that was the largest whistleblower award in history. In 2022, a whistleblower who filed a False Claims Act lawsuit against biotech giant Biogen earned a $266 million realtor’s share award as part of Biogen’s $900 million settlement in the case, knocking the LIBOR award off the pedestal. This SEC award now dethrones the Biogen award. The high-water mark keeps on rising.
These awards not only reflect the remarkable financial incentives that exist for those that bring to light corporate malfeasance, but they also emphasize the growing breadth of the federal whistleblower programs – each of these nine-figure awards were...
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