By Chris Prentice and Andrew Goudsward
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) has fielded over 250 tips from whistleblowers about potential misconduct in the first several months of a pilot program, a top official said on Friday.
The program, which was launched in August, has already proven successful at generating new leads to root out corporate malfeasance, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Marshall Miller said on Friday.
“We’ve already received more than 250 tips, many of which appear to identify criminal conduct we didn’t know about,” he said in prepared remarks at a Practicing Law Institute event.
Miller, who has been at the Justice Department since 2022 and was previously a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, plans to leave the DOJ at the end of next week.
Miller and others at the Justice Department under President Joe Biden helped to design and roll out a series of new policies aimed at whistleblowing, voluntary self-disclosure and compensation clawbacks.
Officials have said the whistleblower program was designed to dovetail with ones already in place elsewhere such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, which have had bipartisan support both at the agencies and on Capitol Hill.
Miller’s remarks come weeks before Republican President-elect Donald Trump is set to return to the presidency, raising speculation that the new administration may adopt a different approach on policing corporate crime.
Reuters spoke with three defense lawyers who speculated that the whistleblower program may be among those likely to be killed under the upcoming Trump administration, after drawing criticism from corporate clients.
But Miller pushed back on that criticism, telling Reuters the program has been designed to encourage whistleblowers to come forward internally and to give firms a window to conduct their own internal inquiries and then report issues.
He described the program as designed to encourage companies to self-disclose misconduct with added urgency, adding: “I would be pretty certain the American public would consider that a feature, not a bug.”
(Reporting by Chris Prentice; editing by Mark Heinrich)
