Administrative Review Board

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Document Preservation Notices Can Lead to SOX Violation!

Mike Delikat and Renee PhillipsPosted on November 17, 2014

On November 12, 2014, the Fifth Circuit affirmed a Department of Labor finding that Halliburton retaliated against a whistleblower by including his name in a document preservation notice. The court also held that emotional distress damages are available under SOX.

In Halliburton, Inc. v. Administrative Review Board, the whistleblower, Anthony Menendez, claimed that he was ostracized and isolated in violation of SOX after Halliburton’s General Counsel sent out a litigation hold notice stating that the SEC had opened an investigation into concerns raised by Menendez about alleged accounting improprieties. Menendez had previously raised these concerns internally to management.

Babysitters at the Gate: The Supreme Court’s Radical Expansion of SOX’s Whistleblower Protections

Renee Phillips, Jill L. Rosenberg and Mike DelikatPosted on March 5, 2014

Yesterday, in Lawson v. FMR LLC, a divided U.S. Supreme Court decided its first case addressing the whistleblower protections of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). The question before the Court: do those protections extend only to the employees of public companies, or do they also reach the employees of contractors and subcontractors of public companies? You can see our prior posts on the case here (June 19, 2012), here (October 8, 2013), here (January 7, 2014), and here (January 28, 2014). READ MORE →

ARB Holds Private Firm Accountants Are Covered By SOX

Renee Phillips and Mike DelikatPosted on June 19, 2012

In Spinner v. David Landau and Associates, LLC, the Department of Labor’s Administrative Review Board (“ARB”) held that an accountant for a private firm was a covered employee under SOX where the firm performed services for publicly traded clients. In so holding, the ARB rejected the First Circuit’s contrary interpretation of SOX in Lawson v. FMR LLC. The Spinner decision provides new ammunition for employees of non-public companies seeking to bring SOX whistleblower claims against their firms and raises significant liability concerns for firms that have operated under the assumption that their employees were not covered by SOX’s whistleblower provisions. READ MORE →

Department of Labor Rejects Title VII Framework in SOX Whistleblower Cases

Mike DelikatPosted on May 14, 2012

A new opinion from the Department of Labor (“DOL”) makes clear that the department will treat the burden of proof in whistleblower retaliation claims under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (“SOX”) differently from typical retaliation claims under Title VII. In an opinion issued in late March – Zinn v. American Commercial Lines Inc. – the DOL’s Administrative Review Board (“ARB”) reversed an administrative law judge’s decision that applied Title VII’s “burden shifting” framework to dismiss Zinn’s whistleblower retaliation claim. Specifically, the ARB removed the third prong of the traditional “burden shifting” analysis as discussed further below.

Under Title VII, once an employee makes a prima facie case of retaliation, the burden shifts to the employer to provide a legitimate non-retaliatory reason for taking the adverse employment action at issue in the case. If an employer provides such a reason, the burden then shifts back to the employee to show that the employer’s reasons were actually a pretext for retaliation. In Zinn, the ARB found it was incorrect to apply this framework and “conflat[e] the SOX burden of proof standard with the Title VII burden of proof.” Under SOX, the employee needs to show that she engaged in protected activity that contributed to an adverse employment action. The burden then shifts to the employer to demonstrate, by clear and convincing evidence, that it would have taken the same adverse action absent the protected activity. However, the ARB clarified that it was unnecessary for the employee to then show that the employer’s actions were pretextual. Instead, once an employer produces evidence to support that its actions were non-retaliatory, an administrative law judge should “weigh the circumstantial evidence as a whole” to “gauge the context of the adverse action in question” and determine whether the case should proceed. With this distinct standard and its rejection of the familiar Title VII framework, the DOL has made it evident that SOX whistleblower cases will continue to be a unique and developing area of employment law.

Employment Law and Litigation