The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced a bounty for a person providing proven financial violations. This time, the whistle-blower can get as much as 10 million dollars for contributing to disguising major financial violations in the corporate sector. However, the regulator didn't disclose all of the details of the deal but mentioned that that was mostly about financial fraud.
In particular, the person contributed a lot to the investigation which boiled down to identifying witnesses and figuring out the most complicated parts of the fraud scheme.
Since such bounties were introduced in 2012, the SEC has already paid around 250 million dollars as bounties to their whistle-blowers (94 people to be more specific). The payments are made from the investor security fund created by the Congress and financed at the expense of the fines paid by the violators. It's important to note that such bounties are newer paid at the expense of victims.
The regulator reported that the whistle-blowers awared with bounties have been provising the SEC with proven and reliable information leading to legal prosecution. The bounty may vary from 10% to 30% of the penalty paid by the violator if the amount is over 1 million dollars.
In June 2020, the SEC paid 50 million dollars to another whistle-blower contributing to punishing the scammers and returning a considerable amount of the stolen money back to the victim investors. This was the biggest bounty ever paid by the SEC, outpacing the 39-million-dollar bounty paid in 2018.
A similar bounty system is used by the second major U.S. financial regulator, the CFTC. The regulator has already paid 120 million dollars in bounties.
