WHISTLEBLOWING

 The term whistleblower has existed for over one hundred years (referring to using a whistle to alert police that a crime was being committed) but it came into popular use with consumer protection advocate Ralph Nader in the 1970s. It is (a) someone who reports waste, fraud, abuse, corruption, or dangers to public health and safety to (b) someone who is in the position to correct the wrongdoing. Sometimes a whistleblower works inside of the organization where the wrongdoing is taking place (whether that is a company or the government); but being an agency or company insider is not essential to serving as a whistleblower. Many whistleblowers get their information from someone they know-a spouse, family member or friend-who is an insider. What matters is that the individual discloses information about wrongdoing that otherwise would not be known.

It was whistleblowers who exposed the Watergate crimes and the atrocities of the Vietnam War;  who exposed the massive accounting fraud that brought down Enron in the early 2000s and who exposed the health dangers of nicotine in tobacco products. In the United States, there are dozens of federal, state and local laws that offer protections and rewards for whistleblowers.

Whistleblower laws are complex and aim to reduce corruption and to protect the public from dangerous products. A key protection in most of these laws is the right of whistleblowers to keep their identities confidential when providing evidence of wrongdoing to the proper authorities. Preventing those accused of wrongdoing from learning the identities of whistleblowers is the best way of ensuring that the whistleblowers will not be retaliated against for disclosures that benefit society. Whistleblower programs provide critical safeguards of whistleblowers’ identities. A variety of powerful U.S. laws also provide financial incentives for whistleblowers to report evidence of wrongdoing, with the amount of rewards tied to how much the whistleblower contributed to the success of prosecutions.

Since 2011, law enforcement agencies implementing these programs have collected a staggering $43.4 billion for the benefit of taxpayers and investors and paid nearly $6.7 billion in rewards to whistleblowers(read the report here-Whistleblower Protections and Rewards- if you want to learn more). Many whistleblower laws provide detailed reporting procedures for whistleblowers to ensure that their claims of abuse of power are heard and addressed by a neutral arbiter.  Timely and meaningful action by unbiased decision makers is critical to the success of any whistleblower statute. 

When an individual or organization learns the identity of a whistleblower reporting evidence of their wrongdoing, they often take retaliatory actions to discredit or punish the whistleblower. This is common when the accused has leverage over the whistleblower in the workplace. To deter these reprisals, whistleblower laws offer a variety of remedies once retaliation has been proven, including: Back pay (wages and benefits lost as a result of being unlawfully terminated); Reinstatement to the whistleblower’s former job; Damages for pain and suffering; Punitive damages; and Attorney’s fees and court costs. Unfortunately, many of these damages can be won only through lawsuits in a federal or state court, requiring the whistleblower to retain an attorney. Given the gaps in many whistleblower protection laws, whistleblowers are often unable to secure a fair remedy despite providing evidence of reprisals, and those who inflict reprisals often are allowed to stay in their jobs with no adverse consequences.  Stronger protections are needed to provide justice for whistleblowers who have been retaliated against and to ensure that retaliation is deterred in the future.