Tag Archives: corporate investigations

SEC Awards Whistleblower-Executive A Half-Million Dollars For “Reporting Out.”

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The SEC has doled out over $50 million in awards to 15 individuals since it inaugurated the Dodd-Frank mandated whistleblower program 3 years ago. That program permits whistleblower awards of 10% to 30% of the total money recovered from a securities law violator provided the sanctions exceed $1 million. Whistleblower awards are usually restricted to individuals who provide original information derived from their independent knowledge or analyses. Failure to be deemed an “original” source of information is ordinarily the end of a whistleblower claim.

On March 2, 2015, however, the SEC approved an award of $475,000 to $575,000 to an unnamed executive who merely passed along original information.[1] That award stemmed from a special carve-out designed to incentivize officers and directors to report out where the company fails to take corrective action. Specifically, an executive may be entitled to a whistleblower award if he or she reports information to the SEC 120 days after alerting upper management of the problem. Similarly, if upper management is already aware of the problem at the time the executive learns of it, the executive-whistleblower must wait 120 days before reporting to the SEC.

The rationale for the 120-day rule is two-fold. On the one hand, the SEC wants to protect companies that have robust compliance programs in place and a strong compliance tone from the top. After all, companies who invest in compliance programs and take potential violations seriously should be afforded a safe harbor whereby they are protected from individuals hoping to make a quick buck by passing information along before the 120-day period expires.

On the other hand, the SEC realizes that executives and directors are uniquely placed to take action when upper management will not remedy the problem. Executives regularly receive management and compliance reports and are often the first persons to whom an employee will turn to report an issue. The SEC wants to incentivize such executives to step forward when upper management refuses to take corrective action.

However, an executive considering becoming a whistleblower risks significant reputational and financial harm. Although the whistleblower process is anonymous, upper management at the company may be able to figure out who reported out and may take retaliatory action against that individual.   Or, the individual may have already resigned due to irreconcilable differences with the company. In either case, there is no guarantee of a whistleblower award. Accordingly, executives and directors thinking about “reporting out” should carefully consider the quality of the information they possess and the potential financial and reputational risks.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/2015-45.html#.VP79EIHF87M

Fifth Time’s A Charm – A Series Of Corporate Disclosures, Together, Can Be A “Corrective Disclosure.”

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On October 2, 2014, a federal appeals court revived an investor class action that had been dismissed by the trial court for failure to plead loss causation. The case is Public Employees Ret. Sys. of Mississippi v. Amedisys, Inc., 13-30580 (5th Cir. Oct. 2, 2014).[1] In it, the Court found that a series of partial disclosures could collectively constitute a “corrective disclosure” of the defendant’s misrepresentations, which the plaintiffs plausibly alleged caused a decline in the defendant’s stock price.

The plaintiffs filed a complaint against Amedisys, a home health care services provider, and certain executives alleging that the company issued false and misleading public statements that concealed its fraudulent Medicare billing practices and artificially inflated its stock price between 2005 to 2010. The complaint alleged that a series of five “partial disclosures,” spread over two years, revealed the misrepresentations and caused a decline in the stock price, as the truth became known.

The disclosures, which spanned from August 2008 to September 2010, included two news reports questioning Amedisys’s billing practices; a press release announcing the resignation of its CEO and CIO; announcements of investigations into the company by the Senate Finance Committee, the SEC, and the DOJ; and the announcement of disappointing operating results in the second quarter of 2010. During the same time period, Amedisys’s stock price gradually declined from $66.07 to $24.02, a drop of over 60%.

The district court analyzed each of the disclosures separately and found that none of them constituted a “corrective disclosure,” which exposed the falsity of Amedisys’s prior statements. The district court dismissed the complaint with prejudice for failure to adequately plead that the plaintiffs’ losses were caused by the company’s misrepresentations.

The Fifth Circuit, however, found that a corrective disclosure does not have to be a single disclosure and analyzed the five disclosures in the Complaint “collectively.” The Court admitted that, if taken alone, the individual disclosures did not make the existence of fraud more probable, noting that neither media speculation concerning wrongdoing nor the mere commencement of a government investigation constitute a corrective disclosure of fraud. Nevertheless, the Court ruled that when taken together, the entire series of events plausibly indicated that the market “was once unaware of Amedisys’s alleged Medicare fraud, had become aware of the fraud and incorporated that information into the price of Amedisys’s stock.” Importantly, the Court noted that the Complaint linked each of the partial disclosures to a corresponding drop in stock value. Accordingly, the Court held that the plaintiffs adequately pled that Amedisys’s alleged false statements caused their loss and reversed the district court’s dismissal.

[1] http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions%5Cpub%5C13/13-30580-CV0.pdf