The National Whistleblower Center (NWC) has made a formal request to the Governor of the Bank of England (BoE), Mark Carney, that the BoE remove a misleading report on U.S. whistleblower reward laws from its website within 10 working days.
The letter to Governor Carney states: “We are concerned that continued use of the BoE Report as a policy reference will only serve to inhibit the implementation of effective anti-fraud laws in the U.K. Many of its assertions […] are simply false.”
The BoE Report, titled “Financial Incentives for Whistleblowers,” was formulated after a group of U.K. regulators visited the U.S. in 2013 to observe its whistleblower programs. Its claims include that U.S. whistleblower rewards do not generate quality tips and that whistleblower programs tax government resources with minimal returns.
NWC’s rebuttal of the BoE Report highlights its misunderstanding of U.S. laws and agency jurisdiction, the selective use of data, and irrelevant evidence and sources.
Read the full NWC rebuttal here.
Executive Director of the National Whistleblower Center, Stephen M. Kohn, stated: “The Bank of England has done a great disservice to the citizens of the U.K. Their report on whistleblower incentive laws is deceptive and has been used to support whistleblower policies that fail to effectively protect whistleblowers.”
“By rejecting financial incentives for whistleblowers, the Bank of England is enabling corruption and weakening the ability of employees and citizens to expose fraud and other crimes,” added Mark Worth, Executive Director of the European Center for Whistleblower Rights in Berlin. “Moreover, the fact that the Bank relied on misrepresentations raises questions about its commitment to ending impunity for guilty parties.”
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Founded in 1988, the National Whistleblower Center (NWC) is a non-profit, non-partisan legal advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. that works to protect whistleblowers around the world.
