In January 2021, Congress took a momentous step in fighting global money laundering by passing the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020 (AML Act). The AML Act established a whistleblower award program for insiders disclosing money laundering violations to the U.S. authorities. Modeled off the Dodd-Frank Act, the AML Act was meant to revolutionize the enforcement of money laundering in the same way the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Whistleblower Program has revolutionized securities enforcement.
However, the AML Act’s whistleblower provisions differed from the Dodd-Frank Act in two key and highly detrimental ways. The AML Act does not include a mandatory minimum award payment for whistleblowers. This means that all whistleblower awards under the program are discretionary. Furthermore, the AML Act did not establish a fund to pay for whistleblower awards, meaning that it relies on yearly appropriations for Congress. Other modern whistleblower award programs have funds for whistleblower awards which are entirely financed through sanctions obtained thanks to whistleblowers.
From the beginning whistleblower advocates warned that these loopholes would undermine an AML whistleblower program, and they have proven to be right. The Wall Street Journal reported that the agency was off to a slow start as whistleblower and whistleblower attorneys were reluctant to come forward without the guarantee of awards. Meanwhile, in fiscal year 2021, the SEC Whistleblower Program ...
We're hearing from people who say they're still owed thousands of dollars from CJF America. And for the first time in months, WRAL talked with the founder, Courtney Jordan, directly.