The SEC’s whistleblower program under Dodd-Frank gets a good bit of media attention, having now issued $55 million in awards to 23 whistleblowers. As I noted here, however, Dodd-Frank quietly required the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to create a whistleblower office, as well, and that office has produced very little in the way of results to date.
As Jean Eaglesham of the WSJ reported yesterday, the CFTC has thus far paid out just two awards totaling $530,000 — while incurring $4 million in administration costs over the past four years to fund its eight-employee whistleblower unit and a smaller “office of consumer outreach.” As noted by the WSJ, the CFTC’s lack of whistleblower awards has prompted the CFTC’s Office of the Inspector General to open a “Review.” The OIG stated in its most recent Semiannual Report to Congress dated September 30, 2015, that the goal of the review is “to determine the reason, if any, for the limited number of CFTC whistleblower awards compared to the SEC, and to recommend best practices in this area.”
