InfoBytes Blog
SEC issues $50 million whistleblower award; third-highest ever
On March 26, the SEC announced awards totaling $50 million to two whistleblowers for volunteering information that led to a successful enforcement action, with one whistleblower receiving $37 million (the third-highest SEC award to date) and the other receiving $13 million. While details of the related enforcement action were not made public, the SEC’s award order noted that one of the whistleblowers “provided information and documentation that were of a significantly high quality and critically important,” including documents that “were akin to ‘smoking gun’ evidence.” As previously covered by InfoBytes here and here, the SEC awarded $50 million to two joint whistleblowers in March 2018 and $39 million to a single whistleblower in September 2018—the two highest awards given by the SEC so far. Since the program’s inception in 2012, the SEC has awarded more than $376 million to 61 whistleblowers.