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Ask not for whom the whistle blows. It blows for thee.
Official whistleblower complaints to the SEC have soared in the last three years and pandemic-era remote work could be a driving factor, as highlighted by an Insider report published Tuesday.
The SEC Office of the Whistleblower is a baby of the Obama Administration, born in 2010 as part of the Dodd-Frank Act, a sweeping set of reforms aimed at curtailing Wall Street following the financial crisis of 2008. In 2012, the first year it released data, the SEC received 3,000 tips. This fiscal year it logged over 12,300 and there's been a 136% uptick since 2019, correlating almost perfectly with the onset of the pandemic
The pandemic saw some high-profile whistleblowers make headlines, especially at Big Tech companies. Facebook's Frances Haugen became a major news story after she leaked thousands of documents in late 2021, and Twitter's ex-head of security Peiter "Mudge" Zatko filed an incendiary complaint this year. Tech companies in particular have retained pandemic-era flexible working arrangements, with a few notable exceptions, like Elon "Hardcore" Musk:
For months, President Donald Trump and his allies have vowed to destroy progressive nonprofits, falsely claiming that they fund and support political violence and terrorism in the U.S. But this we...