SEC awards more than $20M to whistleblower at unnamed company | Hacker News Reader

SEC awards more than $20M to whistleblower at unnamed company

sec.gov

82 pointsjasonhansel17 comments

Unnamed Company could be Danske Bank as penalties were announced today and the amount of the figure is in line with the fines.

https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2022-220

As someone who knows nothing about how they operate it would greatly surprise me if they didn’t obfuscate the time these announcements are made. Otherwise what’s the point of not saying the name of the company if you announce at the same time? So probably just a coincidence (I hope).

You are way overestimating the Feds.

Like WMF mentioned - it takes years for SEC whistleblower awards to be paid out. As of 2021, the median time to file was 22 months and for complex cases like the type that would pay out $20M awards, it was closer to 35 months. This has nothing to do with FTX, especially since the SEC hasn't collected any funds from them that could be awarded.

https://www.sec.gov/files/enforcement-annual-report-2020.pdf

"Whistleblower awards can range from 10 to 30 percent of the money collected when the monetary sanctions exceed $1 million."

That's a big sanction.

I suppose, but not at all rare. ~$60-200M; they're frequently hundreds.

Hilarious that a company can break the law that badly and still be unnamed.

The company's name can be found in the published list of enforcement actions. The whistleblower award announcement is decoupled from it and anonymized to protect the whistleblower. No, I don't know the company's name.

The company was likely drug through the mud very publicly.

The omission here is to protect the whistleblower from retribution, greedy relatives, blacklisting, etc.

Are we conjecturing that the unnamed company is FTX?

It's not. These awards take years to pay out.

Sadly there's obvious innuendo to this post

No, generally bounty awards are made out of recovered funds/punitive fines/damages.

This would have happened at least 1-2 years in the past.

This sort of program is basically the only thing that would make me whistleblow. Why we don't have it in the UK I do not know.

dang, did Caroline get $20 million out of this?

https://twitter.com/ParikPatelCFA/status/1598450343523897355

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