Blue Ash car dealer denies using PPP loan as an excuse to cut pay; Fired employee alleges "potentially fraudulent activity"

WCPO-TV  tv

2020-09-30

The complaint also comes at a time of increased whistleblower activity caused by COVID-19, said Jennifer Pacella, an assistant professor of business law at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. “Many entities are going through really hard times financially and it’s leading to maybe more rationalization than usual, desperation for funding,” she said. “And that’s an area that’s really ripe for unlawful behavior.”

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A state employee said her boss hit her. She complained. Then she lost her job.

Indianapolis Star  print

2020-02-05

Experts say HR professionals would help employees dealing with sexual harassment concerns in 2018, retaliation fears in 2019 and several other issues that commonly emerge in workplaces across all industries. "The benefit to that is that it's just a neutral party's perspective," said Jennifer Pacella, an Indiana University Kelley School of Business professor who studies whistleblower cases. "The opportunity to be biased against you is less because it's not like you have to answer to a superior or something when you go to HR."

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Hearsay, treason and growing concern over the fate of the intelligence community whistleblower

Whistleblower Protection Blog  online

2019-10-01

Over at The Conversation, Jennifer M. Pacella, an Indiana University law professor, writes about the limits on protections for national security whistleblowers. The new whistleblower report that alleges wrongdoing by the president is a reminder of the vital importance of holding wrongdoers accountable, regardless of their level of power. When those acts affect national security, whistleblowing is even more important. But as I’ve found in my whistleblowing research, whistleblowers in this arena have far fewer legal protections from retaliation than those in corporate settings or elsewhere in government.

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Want to be a whistleblower? Read this first

Marketwatch  online

2019-10-01

Many also indicated that whistleblowing had a “severe and negative effect” on work; income; and relationships with ex-colleagues, partners and children, according to the research, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Psychological Reports. “Those risks are higher when you’re in a place with a bad culture that does not support whistleblowing,” Jennifer Pacella, an assistant professor of law at Baruch College, told MarketWatch. “I’m confident that with future generations, that will start to shift.”

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Whistleblowers aren’t hailed as heroes. They’re abused, threatened and harassed

Miami Herald  online

2019-09-30

When President Trump likened a whistleblower’s White House sources to spies and made a lightly veiled reference to execution, he highlighted a longstanding peril facing people who come forward to alert the public to governmental wrongdoing.

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Facilitating the Compliance Function

2019 In the current regulatory era in which we live, compliance is as important as ever. Practitioners, the legal academy, the government, and many organizations of all industries and sizes have responded with insights as to how to best achieve effective compliance while navigating the complex array of regulations incumbent on entities of all types. Regardless of the applicable industry, whether financial, information technology, environmental, healthcare, corporate, or non-profit, the field of compliance is comprised of certain overriding themes that are conducive to facilitating the compliance function. Some of these overriding themes may include the drafting and implementation of effective compliance programs, the development of good corporate governance practices, a responsive management team, and the dissemination of compliance practices throughout the organization. This symposium piece will focus on one running theme that was highlighted during a panel on the intersection of compliance and risk management at the third annual Rutgers Law School Corporate Compliance Institute: the facilitation of the compliance function through a whistle-blower's early detection and reporting of red flags.

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Vaulted Into Victims: Preventing Further Sexual Abuse in U.S. Olympic Sports Through Unionization and Improved Governance

2018 For almost two decades, a sexual predator groomed and abused hundreds of young, female athletes. All the while, he held an esteemed position as the national team doctor for USA Gymnastics, the national governing body for the sport of U.S. gymnastics, and served on the faculty at Michigan State University, where he treated countless female athletes in his sports medicine clinic. This predator, Larry Nassar, is now behind bars for life. At his sentencing hearings earlier this year, hundreds of his victims, many of whom were Olympians, courageously came forward detailing their accounts of sexual abuse at the hands of Nassar, who veiled his abuse and molestation as “legitimate medical treatments” for injured athletes. So many of Nassar’s long list of victims were just children when he abused them (some as young as age ten), and, thus they were unable to comprehend what was happening to them as they pursued their dreams. The nation is now left baffled as to how this abuse persisted for so long and why USA Gymnastics failed to properly detect and stop it. This Article, which is the first scholarly piece to address the USA Gymnastics tragedy from a legal and regulatory perspective, aims to answer the above questions by analyzing the cultural and structural failures within USA Gymnastics that led to this abuse, and by proposing two major governance reforms within the world of U.S. Olympic sports to greatly decrease the likelihood that such a tragedy would ever occur again. These reforms consist of the adoption of a robust whistleblower reporting system with appropriate anti-retaliation protections and the unionization of gymnasts competing within USA Gymnastics so that the interests of vulnerable, young adults are adequately protected from a legal standpoint. The implementation of these legal and structural reforms will help to ensure that, going forward, the physical and emotional well-being of minor athletes is at the forefront of any organization that purports to protect them.

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What Would We Do Without Them: Whistleblowers in the Era of Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank

2018 Today we are discussing whistleblowers in the era of SarbanesOxley and Dodd-Frank. We all know, or we have all come to know, the important role of whistleblowers in protecting the integrity of the U.S. financial system, and we have all also become acutely aware of the need of the U.S. financial system to have its integrity protected. The number of corporate scandals that we see—there seem to be several a week, the most recent scandals including Wells Fargo and Volkswagen, as well as many others. Since the collapse of Enron in the early 2000s, whistleblowers have assumed an increasingly important role in ensuring the integrity of corporate America. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), for example, has developed a comprehensive whistleblower program.

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Whistleblowers Need Not Apply

2018 Whistleblowers are severely disadvantaged when they apply for jobs. Many whistleblowers experience retaliation twofold—once, at their place of employment after they initially blow the whistle, and, second, on the job market for any subsequent employment. This negative trail follows whistleblowers, labeling them as disloyal, suspicious, and, ultimately, not ideal employees and, thus, unable to find work. Current federal law largely ignores this problem, and protections for job applicants with whistleblowing histories have been severely lacking in some of the most prominent whistleblowing statutes. This Article is the first to examine this glaring lack of legal protections as it pertains specifically to whistleblower job applicants by undergoing a comparative analysis of the retaliation protections available in a number of federal statutes and suggesting statutory reform based on that analysis. Specifically, this Article draws comparisons between civil rights statutes, including Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, which each provide expansive protections for job applicants, and the most prominent current federal whistleblowing statutes, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Dodd-Frank Act, and the False Claims Act, which lack these protections. "Whistleblowers Need Not Apply" concludes by recommending amendments to these federal whistleblowing statutes, arguing for specific retaliation protections and redress for whistleblowers who are denied a chance to work again because of their past revelations.

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Silencing Whistleblowers by Contrac

2017 In 2015, the corporate world was jolted as the Securities and Exchange Commission brought forth the first of a series of enforcement actions against employer-mandated confidentiality agreements to silence would-be whistleblowers. KBR Inc. (“KBR”) was the first to incur SEC sanctions for contractually restricting its employees from becoming whistleblowers by requiring them to seek internal approval before making any external disclosures. Contractual restrictions on SEC whistleblowing are made unlawful by Dodd-Frank’s Rule 21F-17, which bars any actions taken to impede potential whistleblowers from reporting wrongdoing to the SEC. Lying dormant until the KBR action, Rule 21F-17 now provides the SEC with an active enforcement mechanism through which the agency regularly penalizes employers for imposing similar restrictions. Although it is now clear from a regulatory standpoint that such confidentiality agreements violate the law, Rule 21F-17 is void of any guidance or explanation as to a much thornier question — whether employers may lawfully restrict their employees from turning over to the SEC internal, confidential documents that support their whistleblowing disclosures. Case law interpreting Rule 21F-17 is similarly lacking. While incorporating the results of a request made by the author under the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) pertaining to the Dodd-Frank whistleblower submission process and frequency of use, this Article is the first scholarly attempt to fill this void in the law. By integrating law from related legal doctrines, including contract law, employment law, and False Claims Act case law, this Article proposes regulatory amendments to Rule 21F-17 that balance the employer’s concerns of safeguarding confidential documents with the whistleblower’s need for providing documentary support of their claims and in furtherance of public policy. Such clarifications to the law will not only allow the SEC and future courts to point to a clear mechanism to determine the lawfulness of such transmissions, but will, most importantly, provide advance guidance to whistleblowers as to the boundaries of relying on documentary support in their revelations of wrongdoing.

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