On August 1, 2024, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) officially rolled out its Corporate Whistleblower Awards Pilot Program (Awards Program). The program is focused on financially incentivizing whistleblowers to report allegations of corporate crime.

DOJ and other federal enforcement agencies have been unshy in recent years about relying on whistleblowers to identify and build enforcement actions. For example, in February of this year, DOJ announced that False Claims Act settlements and judgments eclipsed US$2.68 billion in 2023. Notably, the government relies heavily on whistleblowers in selecting False Claims Act cases to pursue. In its February announcement, DOJ reported that “[w]histleblowers filed 712 qui tam suits in fiscal year 2023.” But, those were civil investigations.

The DOJ is now incentivizing whistleblowers to identify corporate crime. The new Awards Program is the next step in DOJ’s evolution over the past several years toward forcing corporate actors to bring cases to the DOJ. Following the DOJ’s 2015 Yates memo (that officially stated the DOJ was focused on holding individuals accountable for corporate misconduct), DOJ set out to incentivize self-reporting, with the idea that companies would both come forward early and identify individuals implicated by any potential wrongdoing. Now, the DOJ is offering bounties to individuals who provide the DOJ with “original and truthful information about corporate misconduct that results in a successful forfeiture.”...

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