Katz, Marshall & Banks, LLP will be hosting a wine and cheese party to celebrate the life of Beth Daley, a passionate advocate for whistleblower rights and responsible democracy, and to raise funds for the Beth Daley Memorial Impact Fund on Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 5:30pm. For ten years, Beth played a vital role [...]

Since 2007, the State of New York has allowed whistleblowers to use the state’s False Claims Act to sue on behalf of the state, in what is known as a qui tam suit, when they identify Medicaid fraud or contractors who have overbilled the state for goods and services. This month, Governor David A. Paterson [...]

One of the chief motivations behind the strengthening of Sarbanes-Oxley whistleblower protections in the Dodd-Frank Act was to address the rampant financial misconduct by corporate executives that played a large part in causing and sustaining the current financial crisis. One of the ways the act aims to do this is by increasing worker and layperson [...]

Yesterday the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report critical of OSHA’s whistleblower response and protection procedures (read more about the report here). Today, OSHA’s Assistant Secretary of Labor Dr. David Michaels made this statement in response to the GAO’s concerns: “OSHA’s Whistleblower Protection Program exists because of a decades-old belief held by Congress, stakeholders, [...]

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released the report yesterday “Whistleblower Protection: Sustained Management Attention Needed to Address Long-Standing Program Weaknesses,” which emphasized the essential role that workplace whistleblowers play in the enforcement of federal laws, and expressed a sober concern that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which is responsible for investigating and [...]

Earlier this week, Alexis Rickher and Debra Katz of Katz, Marshall & Banks, LLP published an editorial “In-house lawyers left in the lurch” in the National Law Journal, which warned against the withholding of whistleblower protections from in-house counsel on grounds of protecting the attorney-client privilege.  Against recent rulings in Minnesota and Illinois, which declared in-house counsel [...]

The passage of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in late July of this year includes a robust strengthening of the protections already given to workplace whistleblowers under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). In an effort to rein in the rampant financial misconduct that contributed in part to the 2008 financial [...]

In an effort to curb financial misconduct in the wake of the 2008 recession, the recent Dodd-Frank act strengthened the whistleblower protection measures of Sarbanes-Oxley Act by providing incentives to informants who step forward and speak up. According to the act, informants who provide “original information” to the Securities and Exchange Commission can be awarded [...]