19 January, 2022

Jordan Thomas’s Army of Whistle-Blowers

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/24/jordan-thomas-army-of-whistle-blowers

One reason for this urgency is the sheer abundance of corporate malfeasance. After Thomas established his whistle-blowing practice, at the law firm Labaton Sucharow, he commissioned an anonymous survey of finance professionals, conducted by the University of Notre Dame. The findings illuminate a rampant ethical permissiveness: more than a third of respondents who have salaries of half a million dollars or more say that they have witnessed, or have firsthand knowledge of, wrongdoing in the workplace; nearly twenty per cent of respondents “feel financial-services professionals must at least sometimes engage in illegal or unethical activity to be successful.” The S.E.C. established the whistle-blower program partly so that people who witnessed misbehavior would have a reliable mechanism for reporting it. The agency had ignored the forensic accountant Harry Markopolos when he sounded the alarm about Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. “Huge percentages of people know stuff,” Thomas told me. “They’re just not speaking up.” The JPMorgan whistle-blower said, “There were a dozen people I worked with who knew the same information I knew and still didn’t report anything.”