No Bounty For Purported Tipster

On May 31, 2016, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") issued an order upholding the SEC Claims Review Staff's ("CRS") Preliminary Determination denying a claim for a whistleblower award in connection with the enforcement action SEC v. CVS Caremark Corp. Notice of Covered Action 2014-48 ("Covered Action"). This order provides insight into a whistleblower tip that essentially goes nowhere, which is what happens to the overwhelmingly vast majority of them. And this insight is valuable because most attention has been focused on those very few instances where the SEC has in fact awarded a bounty. During the Fiscal Year 2015, the SEC received 3,923 tips, issued orders and determinations on roughly150 whistleblower claims, but only paid out awards to 8 Claimants during that time (or in just over .2 percent of the tips filed). See SEC 2015 Annual Report to Congress on the Dodd-Frank Whistleblower Program. (See our posts on the 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012 Annual