On July 21, 2010, with the country reeling from a devastating financial crisis, President Obama signed into law the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which encompassed comprehensive financial reform the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the Great Depression. Over more than 2,000 pages, the Act created oversight, rules, regulations and various agencies designed to safeguard investors. From the Volcker Rule to the Financial Stability Oversight Council, whistleblower programs for the SEC and CFTC, and dozens of reforms in between, Congress sought to combat both systemic and endemic risk in the commercial markets.
Tag Archives: Jordan A. Thomas
The Incomparable Value of Service in Secret: Lessons from the SEC’s Office of the Whistleblower
Nearly ten years ago, following a global financial collapse spurred by serial wrongdoing, Congress enacted the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Within its 2,000 pages of sweeping reform was the charge to establish an investor protection initiative, which emerged as the SEC Whistleblower Program. Its three pillars—anonymity safeguards, substantial monetary bounties, and significant employment protections—shaped a first-of-its-kind paradigm to encourage individuals to report suspected violations of the federal securities laws. The formidable combination of these programmatic mainstays and an enforcer armed with early actionable intelligence has proven to be a game changer. It’s not just recoveries and reform, however. Behind the results, including in the just-released Office of the Whistleblower’s Annual Report to Congress, stand everyday people willing to take a bold step forward, to be the outsider and the anti-hero, no matter the size of Goliath and his balance sheet. Continue reading
Investors Beware: Some of Those Watchdogs? They’re Lapdogs
Following the stock market crash of 1929, Congress effectively awarded a professional monopoly to CPAs in return for their promise to protect the public by acting as independent watchdogs over publicly traded corporations. With this duty paramount, auditors are required to report known or suspected illegal activity to the authorities or to compel their clients to do so. But rather than vigilance, there seems an endemic lethargy—and oftentimes something far more sinister—that sullies the accounting profession and threatens the public interest.