On December 6, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Marshall Miller delivered a keynote address at the Practicing Law Institute’s White Collar Crime 2024 Program. During his speech, Miller spoke about the DOJ’s recently established whistleblower award program and highlighted the importance of whistleblowers.
“First, whistleblowing. We know it works,” Miller said. “Whistleblower reports to the government lead to prosecutions and civil enforcement actions. Internal reports help companies address misconduct before it gets out of hand. And support for whistleblowing is non-partisan.”
Miller then went on to explain why the DOJ established its whistleblower award program, which officially launched in August.
“We’ve historically had a strong network of whistleblower reporting opportunities through agencies like the SEC and CFTC — but we noticed gaps in key places, leaving potential whistleblowers without a clear reporting path or a clear reason to blow the whistle,” Miller explained. “So, this year, DOJ launched a two-part whistleblower program — with different rules and incentives for whistleblowers not involved in the criminal activity they’re reporting and for those who were.”
The first part of the program, according to Miller, is the DOJ Corporate Whistleblower Awards Pilot Program, which offers monetary awards to whistleblowers who provide original information about corporate misconduct they were not involved in. The second part are the whistleblower non-prosecution pilots launched by the DOJ Criminal Division and many U.S. Attorneys’ Offices in recent months.
While whistleblower advocates have welcomed the DOJ’s interest in increasing its incentives for whistleblowers, they have pointed to shortcomings with both parts of the DOJ’s approach, criticizing provisions of the whistleblower award program and noting that the non-prosecution programs may sow confusion for would-be whistleblowers.
According to Miller, both aspects of the DOJ’s new approach to whistleblowers have shown signs that they “are yielding significant results.”
“In the first few months of DOJ’s whistleblower awards program, we’ve already received more than 250 tips, many of which appear to identify criminal conduct we didn’t know about,” Miller reports. “And U.S. Attorneys’ Offices report that individual voluntary self-disclosures have resulted in promising ongoing investigations.”
Further Reading:
New DOJ Whistleblower Program Highly Flawed According to Experts
Advocates Warn of Potential Risks of U.S. Attorneys’ Offices’ Whistleblower Pilot Programs
