November 16, 2018
In the 2018 Annual Whistleblower Report, the OWB vigorously uses the term "meritorious whistleblowers" in a vague but highly impactful manner.
Specifically, the 2018 Report stated:
"The OWB prioritizes those claims that, based on our
initial triaging and communications with investigative staff, appear to be award-eligible."
However, neither the proposed rules, statements from the OWB, or any publicly available material or guidance for Whistleblowers discusses this so called "triaging".
As mention in earlier comments, if the SEC already has a method of "triaging" this process should be disclosed to individuals and made available to the public so that the public can better understand the how the proposed rules may impact the current "triaging" system.
Furthermore, I wish to further voice my concerns that the SEC is not providing enough guidance to Whistleblowers regarding what a "meritorious" whistleblower claim or tip would look like.
As I can personally attest to, the forms, process, and style of tips that the SEC requests differs from office to office. In fact, during calls with the SEC discussing Whistleblower tips, certain enforcement staff instructed me to provide "condensed" versions of tips (while specifically instructing me not to submit large files such as video evidence), while other staff from different regional offices requested me to provide all of the information organised or in raw format.
The SEC devotes significant resources writing and publishing guidance for public companies but it does not public any guidance to Whistleblowers, leaving them in a precarious situation where they may forced to retain counsel, or simply give up due to the confusion nature and lack of information or clarity from the OWB.
Instead of implementing the proposed rules the SEC should take a step back to and consider the feedback of actual whistleblowers and those who have hit numerous roadblocks during the current whistleblower process.
I am 100% confident if the SEC was better at communicating the process to Whistleblowers and better at providing guidance or examples of good and bad whistleblower tips or claims - then there would be no need to implement rules that prejudice honest whistleblowers who are trying to report fraud to the SEC but get tripped up by the non-transparent nature of the current process.