On May 13th and 17th, 2016, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that it had given awards of over $3.5 million and $5 million to two different whistleblowers. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act created the SEC’s whistleblower program in 2010.  The award of $5 million was the third largest whistleblower award ever issued by the SEC’s whistleblower program. 

In its press releases announcing the awards, the SEC stressed the important contributions of the whistleblowers to the SEC’s enforcement activity. In the case of the $3.5 million award, the whistleblower was an employee who bolstered an ongoing investigation with additional evidence that increased the SEC’s “leverage during settlement negotiations with the company.” The SEC also noted that the $5 million award resulted from a whistleblower’s tip that helped “uncover securities violations that would have been nearly impossible for it to detect without the information.” 

In total, the whistleblower program has awarded more than $67 million to 29 whistleblowers since the program’s inception. Awards can vary from 10 percent to 30 percent of the money collected when the monetary sanctions imposed by the SEC on a company exceed $1 million.