Reporting Securities Violations to the SEC: Why Timing Matters
Finding out that someone you know is engaging in fraudulent activity can put you in a tough position. Do you risk it all to expose their wrongdoing, or do you remain silent and allow them to continue to put you and those they are ripping off in jeopardy.
If you choose to come forward and report your findings to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), it’s important that you do so as soon as possible.
There are several reasons why timing matters when you report securities violations to the SEC, and they all have an impact on whether you will be entitled to a whistleblower reward for your efforts in putting a stop to the schemes in question.
Voluntary Reporting
One of the criteria for becoming an award-winning whistleblower is that you come forward to report your tip voluntarily. This means that you should come to the SEC with your information before you become aware of an SEC investigation into the matter.
At that point, the SEC will begin conducting interviews, and if they request to speak with you before you have had the opportunity to report your tip, you could lose out on your chance to win a significant whistleblower reward.
Tips That Are Original
Timing makes a big difference when reporting your tip to the SEC because you’ll need to be the first person to come forward with this particular piece of information. As part of this, the information that you have needs to have come from a confidential source such as through an internal document or some other source that hasn’t been made public.
With that in mind, if another person who was prepared to blow the whistle beats you to the punch, so to speak, they will be the one who could win a whistleblower award.
Other Requirements to Win a Whistleblower Award
Now that we have reviewed why it’s important to report your tips as soon as possible, we can further explain the other criteria you’ll need to meet in order to win a whistleblower award.
Once you have met the aforementioned requirements and the SEC has begun investigating, they need to find your tip to be valuable to their investigation. So valuable, in fact, that they must be able to impose monetary sanctions amounting to $1 million or more.
The good news is that based on how valuable your tip was to the success of the SEC’s investigation, you could be entitled to between 10 and 30 percent of the recovered sanctions.
Contact an SEC Whistleblower Lawyer
If you have information about potential securities violations and you aren’t sure what you should do next, consult a renowned SEC whistleblower lawyer at Meissner Associates today.
We’ll schedule a confidential tip review so we can better advise you about how to proceed. You can give our office a call at 1-866-764-3100 or fill out the secured contact form we have included at the bottom of this page so you can set up your first appointment.
