Although we’re talking about shady corporate practices, not stagecoach robbery, a well-known, old-timey method of nabbing Wild West outlaws is basically the strategy of the Department of Justice’s new whistleblower rewards program.
“Going back to the days of ‘Wanted’ posters across the Old West, law enforcement has long offered rewards to coax tipsters out of the woodwork,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said on Thursday at the American Bar Association’s annual summit on white collar crime in San Francisco. “And today, we’re announcing a program to update how DOJ uses monetary rewards to strengthen our corporate enforcement efforts.”
Under the new initiative, DOJ officials will award whistleblowers part of the forfeiture that results from prosecuting the “corporate or financial misconduct” they helped uncover. The DOJ will implement the new whistleblower program later this year, and "over the next several months, we’ll fill out the particulars," Monaco said in her keynote address.
Monaco said the DOJ aims to fill in the gaps not covered by existing whistleblower incentives from other federal agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and Internal Revenue Service.
“These programs have proven indispensable—but they resemble a patchwork quilt that doesn’t cover the whole bed,” she said. “They simply don’t address the full range of corporate and financial misconduct that the Department prosecutes.”
The DOJ’s second in command also announced that the department has codified a disclosure incentive program that rewards companies for reporting misconduct they discover during the acquisition of another firm. It announced the M&A Safe Harbor Policy in October.
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