The Securities and Exchange Commission is "the whistleblower's advocate," and the agency's four-year-old whistleblower program can now be deemed a "success," the agency's chairwoman, Mary Jo White, said Thursday.
Speaking at the Corporate and Securities Law Institute at Northwestern University School of Law, White noted that while the agency's whistleblower program, which was mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act, is still "evolving and improving," the volume of tips "has been greater and of higher quality than expected when the program was first adopted" in 2011.
"We have seen enough to know that whistleblowers increase our efficiency and conserve our scarce resources," White said. "Importantly, internal compliance programs at companies also remain vibrant and effective ways to detect and report wrongdoing."
However, despite the "success" of the SEC's program, White said, "the decision to come forward, especially in the face of internal pressure, is not an easy one."
Whistleblowers, White said, "provide an invaluable public service, and they should be supported. And we at the SEC increasingly see ourselves as the whistleblower's advocate."
White added that the "ambivalence about whistleblowers can indeed sometimes manifest itself in an unlawful response by a corporate employer" and that the SEC is "very focused at the SEC on cracking down on such misconduct. We want whistleblowers — and their employers — to know that employees are free to come forward without fear of reprisals."
White noted the first retaliation case, which the agency brought in 2014, as well as the first case "involving the use of a confidentiality agreement that can impede whistleblowers from communicating with us." That case was brought against Houston-based global technology and engineering firm KBR Inc.
