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- Chief Compliance Officer and VP of Legal Affairs, Arrow Electronics
By Bruce Carton2015-04-01T16:30:00
Today, the SEC announced that it that it has filed its “first enforcement action against a company for using improperly restrictive language in confidentiality agreements with the potential to stifle the whistleblowing process.” The SEC filed today’s settled administrative proceeding against KBR, a technology and engineering firm.
The SEC has warned for some time now that it views companies’ attempts to potentially intimidate employees from coming forward as whistleblowers through confidentiality agreements as a form of retaliation – or “pre-taliation,” as the SEC’s Sean McKessy has dubbed it. McKessy, Chief of the SEC’s Office of the Whistleblower, stated last year that the SEC viewed such conduct as unlawful under the Dodd-Frank’s whistleblower rules, and that his office was “actively looking for examples of confidentiality agreements, separation agreements, [and] employee agreements” that condition benefits on not reporting activities to regulators such as the SEC.
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2017-04-04T12:15:00Z By Jaclyn Jaeger
An ongoing legal dispute over how far whistleblower protections extend beyond Dodd-Frank provisions highlights that best practices are already a few steps ahead of the law.
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