An important federal appeals court has just shed a little more light on how much ammunition workers have when suing corporations under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act for whistleblower retaliation.
The California-based Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that two former in-house corporate lawyers can sue their former employer for wrongful termination under SOX, saying the pair need only demonstrate that they reasonably believed fraud had occurred at their company—not that fraud did actually occur. The decision, Van Asdale v. International Game Technology, is that circuit’s first attempt to define the requirements for a whistleblower-retaliation complaint under SOX.
