The SEC whistleblower program lets someone with original, non-public knowledge of a securities law violation report it directly to the Securities and Exchange Commission and, if that tip leads to a successful enforcement action collecting more than $1 million in sanctions, receive an award of 10 to 30 percent of what is collected, according to the SEC’s whistleblower rules. In fiscal year 2025 the agency paid more than $60 million to 48 whistleblowers across 31 covered actions, per the SEC’s fiscal year 2025 annual report to Congress.
Congress created the program under the Dodd-Frank Act, which took effect July 21, 2010, giving the SEC authority to reward people who voluntarily bring it evidence of fraud, insider trading, accounting violations and other securities law breaches. The agency’s Office of the Whistleblower runs the program, evaluates tips, and recommends award decisions to the five-member Commission, which issues the final orders.
Who can qualify as an SEC whistleblower?
Only individuals can qualify — not companies — and they must voluntarily provide the SEC with original information before submitting it to any other authority that later opens a related investigation, according to the SEC’s whistleblower FAQ. Original information means facts the person knows independently, not derived from public sources, or an independent analysis that surfaces insights not apparent on the face of already-public documents. Simply repackaging a news article or a public filing does not qualify.
The information also has to lead to a successful SEC enforcement action with monetary sanctions exceeding $1 million. Related actions brought by other regulators or by the Department of Justice based on the same information can also count toward an award, expanding what a single tip can be worth.
How does someone actually submit a tip?
Whistleblowers file through the SEC’s online Tip, Complaint or Referral (TCR) portal or a hard-copy Form TCR, submitted under penalty of perjury, per the agency’s FAQ page. A whistleblower who first reports internally to their employer’s compliance system has 30 days from that internal report to also file with the SEC and still preserve the original submission date for award purposes.
People can submit anonymously, but only if they are represented by an attorney, who verifies the whistleblower’s identity to the SEC before any award is paid. That structure lets a person’s identity stay out of the public record even as the agency confirms who is entitled to the money.
How is an award amount actually calculated?
Once the SEC posts a Notice of Covered Action — a public notice that an enforcement action resulted in sanctions over $1 million — whistleblowers who believe their tip contributed have 90 calendar days to file a formal award claim on Form WB-APP, according to the SEC. The Commission then decides both whether an award is warranted and where in the 10-to-30-percent range it falls.
Factors that push an award toward the higher end include the significance of the information, the level of assistance the whistleblower provided during the investigation, and the agency’s interest in deterring securities violations. Factors that push it lower include unreasonable delay in reporting or any culpability the whistleblower had in the underlying misconduct. The SEC has issued individual awards as large as tens of millions of dollars in a single case, reflecting how large the underlying sanctions collected can be.
What protection does a whistleblower get?
The SEC states it protects a whistleblower’s identity to the fullest extent possible under the law, though disclosure can still occur in the course of litigation or a related investigation. Separately, federal securities law bars an employer from discharging, demoting, suspending, harassing, or otherwise discriminating against an employee because that employee reported a possible securities violation to the SEC or assisted in an SEC investigation, per the agency’s guidance.
Those anti-retaliation protections apply regardless of whether the SEC ultimately pays an award. A tip that does not lead to a successful action, or that falls under the $1 million sanctions threshold, still triggers the retaliation protections for the person who reported it in good faith.
How many tips does the program actually receive?
The SEC’s whistleblower office received approximately 27,000 tips in fiscal year 2025, though the agency noted that roughly 12,000 of those came from just two individuals, a concentration that shapes how the office prioritizes review. The most common categories of alleged violations reported that year were market manipulation, offering fraud, corporate disclosure and financial-reporting issues, and cryptocurrency-related securities matters, according to the fiscal year 2025 annual report.
The program’s award fund, financed separately from the SEC’s general budget, held about $361.8 million at the start of fiscal year 2025 and about $318.5 million at year’s end, after the SEC paid out roughly $170.2 million to whistleblowers across all pending claims that fiscal year, per the same report.
What happens after a claim is denied?
A whistleblower whose claim is denied, or who disagrees with the size of an award, can appeal the Commission’s order to a federal court of appeals. The SEC’s published orders on both awards and denials are posted publicly, though they are written to avoid identifying the whistleblower or the specific tip details that could reveal who filed it.
The process is designed to run independently of any parallel criminal case tied to the same underlying conduct. A whistleblower’s civil award claim under this program is a separate track from any prosecution the Department of Justice might pursue against the company or individuals accused of the violation — this program pays for information, not for testimony in a criminal trial.
Why did Congress build in a financial incentive?
Securities fraud is often hard for regulators to detect from the outside, since the people who can see it most clearly — employees, auditors, business partners — have little reason to risk their careers to report it. Congress modeled the SEC program partly on similar whistleblower incentives used in other federal fraud enforcement, reasoning that a meaningful financial stake changes that calculus. The design also ties the reward directly to money the government actually recovers, so the fund pays for results rather than for tips alone.
That link between award size and sanctions collected explains why filings involving large-scale fraud tend to produce the biggest individual payouts, while smaller violations that still clear the $1 million sanctions threshold produce awards toward the lower end of the 10-to-30-percent range.
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