Home > In The News > Articles > Berman v. Neo@Ogilvy Creates Circuit Split on Dodd-Frank’s Whistleblower Protections

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Scher
Scher

In Berman v. Neo@ogilvy LLC, the Second Circuit held that there was enough ambiguity between the Dodd-Frank Act’s definition of “whistleblower” and its anti-retaliation provisions to trigger Chevron deference to the SEC’s interpretation of the statute. The Second Circuit thus accepted the SEC’s interpretation that Dodd-Frank does not require whistleblowers to report wrongdoing to the SEC to invoke the Act’s employee protection provisions. This is the opposite conclusion reached by the Fifth Circuit in Asadi v. G.E. Energy (USA), L.L.C., setting the stage for the Supreme Court to resolve the conflict among the Circuits.

This article by TELG managing principal R. Scott Oswald and former principal David L. Scher was published by Westlaw Journal Employment on November 10, 2015. The full article is .

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Berman v. Neo@Ogilvy Creates Circuit Split on Dodd-Frank’s Whistleblower Protections

In Berman v. Neo@ogilvy LLC, the Second Circuit held that there was enough ambiguity between the Dodd-Frank Act’s definition of “whistleblower” and its anti-retaliation provisions to trigger Chevron deference to the SEC’s interpretation of the statute. The Second Circuit thus accepted the SEC’s interpretation that Dodd-Frank does not require whistleblowers to report wrongdoing to the SEC to invoke the Act’s employee protection provisions. This is the opposite conclusion reached by the Fifth Circuit in Asadi v. G.E. Energy (USA), L.L.C., setting the stage for the Supreme Court to resolve the conflict among the Circuits.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, 15 U.S.C. § 78u–6, was passed in 2010 in response to the 2008 economic crash. Section 922 of Dodd-Frank contains two courses of relief for whistleblowers: a whistleblower can provide information to the SEC and the SEC may provide that whistleblower with a monetary award; or a whistleblower may file a private cause of action against an employer who retaliates because of the whistleblower’s protected disclosures (this latter section is often referred to as the “anti-retaliation provision”).