The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has upheld the SEC’s decision to deny an award to an anonymous whistleblower identified in court records as John Doe. Judge Florence Pan wrote the majority opinion, joined by Judge J. Michelle Childs. The court’s ruling was reissued Wednesday, according to the D.C. Circuit.
What the court required
The majority treated the case as a question of whether Doe’s submission gave the SEC useful information for an enforcement action. Under the Dodd-Frank program, the court said, an award depends on a voluntary submission of original information to the SEC that assists a successful enforcement matter. Doe’s eventual filing did not meet that standard because the agency was already investigating the company and did not receive information from him that advanced the case, according to the court’s opinion.
Doe had first taken his allegations and supporting documents to an investigative journalist rather than filing with the SEC. The journalist published reports, sent the materials to the Department of Justice and relayed advice from a DOJ lawyer that Doe should submit a tip to the SEC. The court concluded that the later agency filing, not the earlier disclosure to the journalist, was the submission relevant to Doe’s award claim.
The filing history
Doe suspected that his former employer was routing bribes to foreign officials to obtain business with state-owned entities. He waited more than a year before submitting the SEC’s Tip, Complaint, or Referral form. By then, the SEC’s investigation had been underway for eight months. The agency found that the late filing and later interviews did not add information that moved the enforcement case forward, and it rejected his request for compensation. The underlying action ended in a seven-figure settlement, according to the Tampa Free Press.
The SEC says that a person who first reports information to the agency by another method must submit Form TCR within 30 days, according to its whistleblower guidance. In Doe’s case, the majority’s reasoning also turned on the lack of useful contribution to an investigation already in progress.
The dissent and the competing claims
Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson disagreed with the majority’s treatment of causation. She viewed the issue as whether Doe’s information set in motion the events that led to the company’s penalties, rather than whether his formal SEC filing arrived soon enough or supplied additional assistance. The majority rejected that approach.
Doe’s attorney, Stephen Kohn of Kohn & Colapinto, argued during the September 2025 oral arguments that the statute covered voluntary disclosures to the press and challenged the SEC’s interpretation of the filing requirement. He also invoked the Supreme Court’s 2024 Loper Bright decision, according to Courthouse News Service.
Two other whistleblowers received a combined $12 million from the same enforcement proceeding, while Doe was denied an award, Courthouse News Service reported. The Associated Press, the Guardian and First Amendment advocacy groups also filed a brief supporting award eligibility for people who approach journalists before regulators, according to that report.
