Weeks after he officially accepted responsibility for his criminal conduct, Bush administration Special Counsel Scott Bloch filed a $202 million RICO lawsuit against individuals, whistleblower protection groups, and federal investigators who reported his criminal acts to the Department of Justice.  This week, Debra S. Katz,  counsel for former employees of the United States Office of [...]

Three Senators have asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate ties between the nuclear power industry and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (the NRC), the industry’s principal safety regulators, after a year-long Associated Press investigation revealed last week that the NRC has colluded with the industry higher ups for decades to progressively lower and ignore safety [...]

David J. Marshall, a partner at Katz, Marshall & Banks, LLP, has published a comprehensive SEC Whistleblower guide outlining the rules that allow insiders to earn substantial monetary awards for reporting securities violations to the Securities and Exchange Commission.  Since the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002, Marshall has successfully represented many employees of public companies [...]

Advocates for nuclear safety and nuclear power plant workers have urged caution and oversight after the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) recently announced that it will begin reconstructing the Bellefonte 1 nuclear reactor in Alabama which was abandoned in 1988.  The opening is part of TVA’s initiative to have fifty percent of its generation come from [...]

According to a recent audit of 17 food recalls, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) violates its own policies when attempting to tackle contaminated – or ‘adulterated’ – imported food.  The New York Times reports that the recall audit included listeria-infected mussels from New Zealand, salmonella-tainted cantaloupes from Honduras and fish from Korea containing [...]

A twenty-five year legal battle continues to develop between the US Department of Energy and the thousands of plaintiffs who claim that the secretive and unsecured nuclear weapons development programs at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation unjustly caused their cancers and other ailments. The plaintiffs, dealt a series of regular blows since the battle’s inception, have [...]

A whistleblower involved in the arduous cleanup and containment efforts at the nation’s largest site of radioactive nuclear waste will be meeting with members of Congress after a report by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB), a federal agency of nuclear experts tasked with making sure the country’s radioactive waste sites remain safe, declared [...]

With the US government’s continued reliance on defense contractors to provide services to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, foreign employees have become an integral part of subcontractors’ workforce; but their experiences have been blighted by unfair labor practices and human rights violations, possibly to include human trafficking.  In a recent New Yorker article, “Invisible Army,” [...]

Senator Patrick Murray has reintroduced the Protecting America’s Workers Act, which would amend the Occupational Safety and Health Act, bringing what Murray calls “a long-overdue update to the…OSH Act.”  The proposed amendments would increase whistleblower protections for workers, allowing them to report on internal safety and ethics violations without fear of retaliation.  It would also [...]

In the first decision interpreting the scope of Dodd-Frank’s whistleblower anti-retaliation provisions, a United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York found in favor of the whistleblower, reasoning that the anti-retaliation provisions of Dodd-Frank do not apply only to those who provide information to the SEC, but also to those whose disclosures [...]