July 16, 2010 8:51AM # Major Whistleblower Provisions in Financial Regulation Bill By [Walter Olson](https://www.cato.org/people/walter-olson) --- SHARE When Congress passes major new regulatory laws, it nowadays routinely throws in provisions authorizing lawsuits on behalf of so-called whistleblowers at regulated businesses. Lawmakers do this despite frequent complaints that such provisions encourage discontented employees to seize on borderline conduct and label it fraud or rule-breaking, enrich some persons who themselves took part in questionable practices, and interfere with companies’ own internal compliance efforts, to name a few presumably unintended consequences. One reason these provisions are added with such regularity despite their at-best-mixed record is that they are lobbied for avidly by two groups of lawyers, the so-called *qui tam* bar (which collects a percentage of the sometimes enormous informant bounties provided by statute) and the plaintiff’s employment bar, for whom the laws (especially “anti-retaliation” provisions) can provide valuable leverage in negotiating on behalf of terminated employees even if no bounty is available. While it has not been a major focus of bill opponents, the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill is loaded with major new extensions of whistleblower law into the economy’s financial sector. Michael Fox at Jottings By An Employer’s Lawyer [has more](http://employerslawyer.blogspot.com/2010/07/financial-reform-passes-major.html), and links to a [more detailed account](http://employmentlawgroupblog.com/2010/07/15/dodd-frank-bill-provides-robust-whistleblower-protections/) at an understandably jubilant plaintiff’s-lawyer site. I [covered the issue a few weeks ago](http://overlawyered.com/2010/05/informants-rejoice/) at Overlawyered, where there is also background on [qui tam](http://overlawyered.com/tag/qui-tam/) and [whistleblower](http://overlawyered.com/tag/whistleblowers/) matters more generally. ##### Related Tags [Constitutional Law](https://www.cato.org/constitutional-law), [Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies](https://www.cato.org/robert-levy-center-constitutional-studies) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).