In the first installment of this Article published Jan. 13, we discussed, in Parts I and II, the broad antiretaliation provisions in SOX and in Dodd-Frank designed to protect employees from adverse employment actions taken in response to the employee's report of possible securities law violations within the organization and to the SEC. As we explained, an employer may not discharge, demote, suspend, threaten, harass, or in any other manner discriminate against an employee in the terms and conditions of employment because of an action by the employee that is protected by statute. Under SOX and Dodd-Frank, a qualified reporting employee may prosecute a retaliation claim regardless of whether the underlying allegations of a securities law violation are found to have merit. Because the remedies available under Dodd-Frank are more generous than the SOX remedies and the statute of limitations is considerably longer, we explained in Part III that a number of claimants have filed complaints in federal court under Dodd-Frank alleging unlawful retaliation sparked by internal reports protected by SOX. We further discuss the conflicting interpretations of Dodd-Frank's whistleblower-protection provisions in the federal courts.
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Originally published by BNA Bloomberg, Securities Regulation & Law Report, 01/27/2014.
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