The Trump administration has effectively silenced a successful financial whistleblower recruitment program that encouraged industry insiders to report white-collar crimes and led regulators to return $1.5 billion in ill-gotten gains to investors.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which regulates stock and bond markets, has declined to award a single dollar to whistleblowers in the first three months of fiscal year 2026 after denying a record number of these claims in 2025. Payments are made to individuals who provide “specific, timely, and credible” reports of violations of securities law that result in sanctions exceeding $1 million; awards range from 10 to 30 percent of the fines collected. Whistleblower payments have not bottomed out to this extent since 2017 under the Obama administration.
Created under the Dodd-Frank Act in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the program has paid 444 individual whistleblowers more than $2.2 billion for their successful tips since its 2011 inception. Awards were especially high in the final year of the Biden administration, when commissioners paid out more than $255 million to forty-seven whistleblowers, the third-largest annual total in the program’s history.
The whistleblower program “directly benefits investors, as whistleblower tips have contributed to enforcement actions resulting in orders requiring bad actors to disgorge more than $4 billion in ill-gotten gains and interest,” the SEC’s then-director of...
The Minnesota Department of Human Services published a "fact check" in which it rejected a claim that "Minnesota's fraud problem is uniquely bad." The Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) p...