Corporate Governance

New SEC Whistleblower Rules Fall Short

By Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance

The SEC recently released its proposed rules implementing the whistleblower program established under Section 922 of the Dodd-Frank Act. The proposed rules do not go far enough to avoid undermining corporate compliance systems. We summarize our key observations in this memo, and a more detailed discussion of the proposal and the issues it presents is attached.

To be eligible for a bounty, a whistleblower must supply ?original information? which the SEC has not otherwise already obtained. This creates an incentive to race in to the SEC to stake the first claim, rather than report up through established corporate compliance channels. The rules would allow a whistleblower?s report to the SEC to relate back to the date of the same person?s earlier internal corporate report, as long as the whistleblower contacts the SEC within 90 days of reporting internally. While this provision would allow for internal reporting, it would do nothing to encourage it. We propose that internal reporting should be a prerequisite to an SEC whistleblower report, absent extraordinary circumstances, and that up to 120 days should be permitted for the internal review to proceed.

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Full post as published by The Harvard Law School Corporate Governance Blog on December 12, 2010 (boomark / email).