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The Justice Insiders - DOJ's Cacophony of Whistles

 
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Episode 23: DOJ’s Cacophony of Whistles

Host Gregg N. Sofer welcomes Husch Blackwell partner Christina Moore to the show to unpack recent remarks made by Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco concerning a new Department of Justice whistleblower program. Monaco described a “90-day sprint” to stand up the new program, which purports to enhance DOJ’s corporate enforcement efforts by offering financial incentives to individuals who come forward with information about violations of federal law.

Gregg and Christina discuss the peculiarities of the program as it is understood presently, including questions regarding the anonymity of whistleblowers, the complications of multiple competing whistleblower programs, and the complexities of handling information in parallel proceedings.

Gregg and Christina also explore the practical matter of how the newly proposed program should be addressed by corporate compliance professionals and the importance of properly staffing and resourcing such programs so that employees utilize in-house channels to surface potential instances of wrongdoing.

Gregg N. Sofer Biography | Full Biography

Gregg counsels businesses and individuals in connection with a range of criminal, civil and regulatory matters, including government investigations, internal investigations, litigation, export control, sanctions, and regulatory compliance. Prior to entering private practice, Gregg served as the United States Attorney for the Western District of Texas—one of the largest and busiest United States Attorney’s Offices in the country—where he supervised more than 300 employees handling a diverse caseload, including matters involving complex white-collar crime, government contract fraud, national security, cyber-crimes, public corruption, money laundering, export violations, trade secrets, tax, large-scale drug and human trafficking, immigration, child exploitation and violent crime.

Christina Moore Biography | Full Biography

A St. Louis-based partner on Husch Blackwell’s Healthcare and White Collar, Internal Investigations & Compliance teams, Christina represents clients in a wide variety of healthcare litigation and compliance matters, including insurance questions, reimbursement disputes, regulatory matters, and Department of Justice investigations. Previously, she served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Missouri for nearly a decade, often handling medical malpractice matters, healthcare fraud, and qui tam actions. She later accepted an in-house counsel role on the medical campus of a large private university, guiding the medical school, health sciences college, and nursing school, as well as a physician practice of more than 500 providers.

Additional Resources

Christina Moore and Madison Rector, “Let’s Make a Deal with DOJ: The Impact of the DOJ’s New Whistleblower Reward Program on Corporate Compliance,” Healthcare Law Insights, April 26, 2024

U.S. Department of Justice, “Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco Delivers Keynote Remarks at the American Bar Association’s 39th National Institute on White Collar Crime,” March 7, 2024

Michaels, Dave, “Justice Department to Pay Whistleblowers Who Tip on Corporate Crime,” The Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2024

Smagalla, David, “Justice Department to Flesh Out Whistleblower Program After 90-Day ‘Policy Sprint,’” The Wall Street Journal, March 8, 2024

Freedman, Robert, “DOJ said to be opening can of worms with whistleblower awards,” Legal Dive, March 12, 2024

Read the Transcript

This transcript has been auto-generated

00;00;01;23 - 00;00;28;09

Gregg Sofer

Ever wonder what is going on behind the scenes as the government investigates criminal cases? Are you interested in the strategies the government employs when bringing prosecutions? I'm your host, Gregg Sofer, and along with my colleagues in Husch Blackwell's White Collar, Internal Investigations and Compliance team, we will bring to bear over 200 years of experience inside the government to provide you and your business thought provoking and topical legal analysis.

00;00;28;09 - 00;00;35;26

Gregg Sofer

As we discuss some of the country's most interesting criminal cases and issues related to compliance and internal investigations.

00;00;37;15 - 00;00;56;02

Gregg Sofer

Welcome to the latest episode of The Justice Insiders. My name is Gregg Sofer. I'm your host, and I'm lucky enough today to be joined by my partner, Christina Moore, who's in our healthcare strategic business unit and sits in our St. Louis office. We're going to link to her full bio, which is quite impressive in the show notes.

00;00;56;11 - 00;00;58;00

Gregg Sofer

Hi, Christina. Thanks for joining us.

00;00;58;15 - 00;01;01;08

Christina Moore

And good morning. Thanks a lot for inviting me. I appreciate it, Greg.

00;01;01;25 - 00;01;30;27

Gregg Sofer

My pleasure. So once again, we have Lisa Monaco every time she speaks at any conference or get together, the whole world waits to see what the Department of Justice is going to do. And everybody writes articles about it. And once again, in March, she spoke about a whistleblower program. I wonder if you can just sort of take us through the very basic aspects of what she said, and then we'll get into what are the implications of this for people like us and our clients.

00;01;31;07 - 00;02;01;23

Christina Moore

Sure. And I was there. It was always fun to be there witnessing what she has to say. And her remarks weren't terribly long. I mean, there was less than 3000 words, but she talked about towards the end about this DOJ's new whistleblower program. And she talked about it essentially, if an individual comes to DOJ with significant corporate or financial misconduct that is not known to the government, then that person can get a portion of forfeiture.

00;02;02;06 - 00;02;28;13

Christina Moore

So that was kind of the gist of it. I mean, it's rooted in what she calls its time honored understanding that people and corporations respond to incentives. So that's the DOJ's belief is it's human nature that people respond to incentives. And so they're wanting to create more incentives for people to come to DOJ with tips. And one of the messages that she said was, knock on our door before we knock on yours.

00;02;28;15 - 00;02;47;16

Christina Moore

So that was kind of a key message that she had. But I think it was also important that she made clear that don't wait too long to knock because you need to be the first in the door to be eligible for an award. There's definitely more to come. She noted that this was a 90 day sprint, whatever that means.

00;02;47;16 - 00;03;12;17

Christina Moore

It's gather information, consult with stakeholders and hopefully create a thoughtful, well informed program. So we don't know a lot of information right now. We know that compensation is only available to people who provide truthful information that they don't know about, but they also have an only eligible if they themselves are not involved in the criminal activity. So it's not like a voluntary self-disclosure.

00;03;13;01 - 00;03;37;25

Christina Moore

And we also know that the reward is only provided after all the victims of the reported misconduct have been compensated. And we also know that the reward will likely have a specific threshold. There were some also some comments about, you know, other programs having $1,000,000 threshold or things like that. But so we don't know all these details, but there's definitely going to be more to come.

00;03;37;25 - 00;03;41;23

Christina Moore

But that was kind of the basic gist of what she shared with us in March.

00;03;42;02 - 00;04;02;06

Gregg Sofer

Yes, I always find it funny that only in the U.S. government is a three month period of time considered a sprint. That to me is where you start here. But I guess we'll get more details about this. But I think the program, as you have sort of outlined and it raises a number of really interesting questions and I'd like us to go through some of them.

00;04;03;00 - 00;04;28;23

Gregg Sofer

So I think the first question I have is whether or not a program like this very generally is really the right way to motivate companies and people into providing the government with information that leads to really important and impactful prosecutions and enforcement actions. I could see an argument on both sides of this, but I'm interested in your thoughts.

00;04;28;23 - 00;04;58;04

Gregg Sofer

I'll start off by saying my experience is that the Department of Justice is woefully under-resourced to follow up currently on what I would call white collar offenses generally that throughout the United States, if you go to FBI offices, the place where they are lacking the most in terms of personnel and resources is in the white collar enforcement. They're doing national security.

00;04;58;04 - 00;05;13;22

Gregg Sofer

They're doing violent crime. Now, because we have so many violent crime problems, they've stepped into the role of states to try to fill in that gap. And it's very difficult to get anybody to actually work a white collar case. Has that been your experience as well?

00;05;14;07 - 00;05;37;27

Christina Moore

Oh, yeah. I mean, the ABA conference, there was a lot of us talking about that, talking about defense attorneys, talking about the lack of actual cases that are being brought by the government. And my thought was that, you know, last year in 2023, Deputy DeMONACO talked about DOJ's commitment to providing the right incentives to promote and support corporate compliance.

00;05;38;06 - 00;06;09;07

Christina Moore

And there was a big initiative to have voluntary self-disclosure programs across all 93 U.S. attorneys offices. And I think that makes a lot more sense to me as somebody who used to be in house, as I mean, as a compliance officer, you know, the voluntary self disclosure program is something that was rolled out in the prior AB conference and so was to me really important that they have voluntary self-disclosure for every single U.S. attorney's offices and seemed to be more of a uniform program.

00;06;09;18 - 00;06;34;27

Christina Moore

I mean, I don't have any trust that anything is uniform in the government, but I do think that as a compliance officer, I mean, if you recognize a potential issue, you want to be able to evaluate and Caesars anything wrong and be able to take advantage of that voluntary self-disclosure. You don't want some employee who gets some wild hair that is like, Oh, I think something's up.

00;06;35;06 - 00;07;08;18

Christina Moore

I'm going to go report it. And then that defeats your ability to carefully evaluate things and then make that voluntary self-disclosure so you get the benefit of that. That was just my perspective, is just sitting there thinking that there's so many different competing interests and you don't want somebody that as an employee that has some like incentive to go report to DOJ and then you're stuck with like that's that's, you know, you want your people to come to you and talk to you about issues.

00;07;08;18 - 00;07;19;26

Christina Moore

Nafi promised some kind of money incentive to go report, and he doesn't even report to you. I don't know what the U.S. Attorney's office I mean, how are you going to how are you going to be first if you don't even know where to go?

00;07;20;10 - 00;07;47;21

Gregg Sofer

Yeah. I mean, I think the really interesting concept here is that a Department of Justice that can't properly resource and investigate white collar crime, on the one hand, is trying to keep the spigot running faster and faster and faster and information coming in. And I think part of that is a result of the lack of resources, meaning they're not out there investigating these crimes in a proactive way.

00;07;47;21 - 00;08;07;09

Gregg Sofer

They're reacting to information coming to them. But I think it's a really interesting concept that they're trying to have more and more information flow into the Department of Justice to have to investigate. But they really just don't have a set of resources to do this. And I think there's big issues even from inside the department. I was still with the department.

00;08;07;09 - 00;08;24;19

Gregg Sofer

I would be very concerned about the potential liability either political or otherwise, for the department in getting all of this information and then being unable to act on it, which I think is a really interesting dynamic. So on the one hand, the Department keeps saying, we're going to up our enforcement, we're going to require companies to do this.

00;08;24;19 - 00;08;52;06

Gregg Sofer

We need companies to do that. We're going to incentivize people coming to us early, voluntarily disclose things. On the other hand, I don't see and perhaps because there's such a long delay in the investigation and ultimate prosecution of criminal cases in the white collar space, maybe we're just lagging here, but we have not seen, as far as I'm aware, the uptick in actual cases being brought that you would expect from this.

00;08;52;07 - 00;09;25;09

Gregg Sofer

So it's interesting that they're piling on here. And to your point, if what you want is internal corporate compliance and internal good corporate behavior, and maybe that's what this is really about, is they're trying to make sure that a company is doing this internally because they're so afraid that someone might blow the whistle. I'm not sure this is the best way of doing that in the sense, as you point out, you may divert a person who would normally go to the company's compliance folks or the c-suite or the h.r.

00;09;25;09 - 00;09;45;27

Gregg Sofer

Folks to provide information directly to the company so it can get its house in order to someplace where they can go and make $1,000,000. And then the slew of problems for this company in the course of dealing with an investigation that is it comes from the from the government versus being able to handle it internally is much more significant.

00;09;45;27 - 00;09;48;21

Gregg Sofer

Do you agree with that analysis or am I half baked?

00;09;48;27 - 00;10;12;05

Christina Moore

No, I definitely agree with that. I think that when I was sitting in the audience listening to her, that's what I was concerned about, is just thinking, you know, if somebody thinks that there's an issue, instead of going knocking on DOJ's door, you want them to knock on compliance officers door. You want them to express to you what they think is a problem so that you can have fully investigated.

00;10;12;05 - 00;10;35;00

Christina Moore

I mean, to your point, too, is just that a lot of times, like in particularly in health care, these things are very complicated. You know, it's not just your run of the mill FBI agent that I mean, they're smart. They can take these cases, but it's very complicated. Medical billing is extremely complicated. You have to have, you know, experts in this to recognize there is really an issue there.

00;10;35;01 - 00;10;53;17

Christina Moore

So I think that's why you want your corporate compliance people to be able to look at something and say, no, this isn't compliant with the law. This is why. This is why. And make sure you can communicate to that person that's making the phone to the they feel satisfied. But I mean, to me, these cases are really complicated.

00;10;53;17 - 00;11;13;11

Christina Moore

So just having somebody go to DOJ, so to, you know, a FBI agent is normally doing violent crimes. It's just it makes it more complicated. And I'm not sure they're going to be equipped to handle that. But that's why it makes more sense to have your corporate compliance team to be able to evaluate that and take steps if something has gone awry.

00;11;13;20 - 00;11;33;28

Christina Moore

I mean, a lot of times I don't think that things happen for nefarious reasons. I just think that Medicare rules are just really complicated. And I think something can happen in where you're building things with all the different medical providers and you just need to make a correction and fix something and then disclose it.

00;11;34;09 - 00;12;01;28

Gregg Sofer

Yeah. And there's this goes to an important point, which is you have the False Claims Act, which allows individuals inside a company where the government is involved on some level be able to collect significant amounts of money in a in a civil essentially a civil enforcement matter. You have CDC whistleblower programs. There's a number of other whistleblower programs and protections out there, a whole litany of it.

00;12;01;28 - 00;12;32;07

Gregg Sofer

There's an entire area of legal practice, and there's people who do this just for a living, just representing whistleblowers. But this is likely to be a program that focuses on criminal cases because it's coming out of DOJ. And although one of the things we've talked about in the podcast before is the Department of Justice is often working with its partners and you could be facing on any investigation administrative, civil and criminal investigations all at the same time.

00;12;32;28 - 00;13;02;14

Gregg Sofer

It's often a three headed hydra, not to mention a civil case that could be brought by the whistleblower themselves against the company under certain circumstances. So you could be facing four different kinds of potential avenues of destruction on some level. But here it's probably focused on criminal to some extent, just by the very nature of the DOJ, as is running it, there are mechanical issues associated with this and legal issues that are particular to a whistleblower program.

00;13;02;14 - 00;13;17;29

Gregg Sofer

Looking at criminal enforcement, I'm wondering if you could just discuss a couple of those. I know you were a prosecutor for a long time. Well, let's start with the fact that your main witness, at least at the beginning of a whistleblower investigation, is looking to try to make a million bucks.

00;13;18;09 - 00;13;43;24

Christina Moore

Generally, as you know, in criminal cases, if that person is going to testify, that person will have to be disclosed. And the fact that they have an incentive would have to be disclosed. But here the situation is really interesting because I can envision if you have a person let go that presents a case to DOJ, they were not involved in the wrongdoing and maybe they don't have personal knowledge, so maybe they can't testify.

00;13;43;24 - 00;14;14;25

Christina Moore

If they don't have personal knowledge. But they could be the reason why a criminal investigation was started. In this odd situation, if you're subject to a criminal investigation, it's possible that that person may not ever be revealed to you. I'm just not sure what legal constitutional basis you would need if that person doesn't testified to the person, doesn't have evidence that the government has to turn over, then it's possible that you could have a whistleblower be the cause of your criminal investigation and get a financial incentive and you not be aware of that.

00;14;14;25 - 00;14;17;00

Christina Moore

And that seems very odd to me and not right.

00;14;17;11 - 00;14;47;06

Gregg Sofer

Yeah. I mean, so I would analogize this like a drug case, for instance, where you get a tip from an informant or you have an informant go in. Many times an investigation in the criminal realm is designed to keep the person who first brought this information to the government anonymous. And I would think that any whistleblower program to properly incentivize the whistleblower is going to do everything it can to keep that person anonymous, particularly in a criminal case.

00;14;48;04 - 00;15;24;29

Gregg Sofer

Sometimes that's possible. Many times you can construct an investigation in a case in a way that prevents the defense lawyers like us from finding out who that person is. Sometimes you can't, but the anonymity aspect of this is very interesting to the extent, as you point out, someone would have to testify. You have to, under the existing law and a very established law, provide to the defendant, or if it's a company or an individual, the things that would essentially cause that witness to be biased or motivated to say a certain thing or present a certain set of facts.

00;15;24;29 - 00;15;48;12

Gregg Sofer

And that's what Giglio material very clearly here you're talking about someone who could potentially make $1,000,000 or more that it falls into that category. Also, if that person provides information that is exculpatory at the beginning, so maybe they come in and give some in copies or information and some exculpatory information. That's Brady material under the law. And that has to be turned over.

00;15;48;12 - 00;16;15;19

Gregg Sofer

Also, whether or not that person is called as a witness potentially. And so I think they're going to have to as they build the program, which is going to want to provide anonymity as much as possible. They have to factor in these other concept. They essentially are going to have to tell the informant or the whistleblower at the beginning of the case, we can't promise you at the beginning whether or not you're you could be called as a witness or not, it seems to me.

00;16;16;08 - 00;16;31;14

Gregg Sofer

But this goes back to the the bigger question with whether or not they'll ever be able to even make a case based on the volume of information that comes in. What other concepts and issues do you think are raised by the program in general? Christi, and.

00;16;32;00 - 00;16;56;07

Christina Moore

Yeah, I think that it's going to be complicated with with the voluntary self disclosure, they made it very clear that all officers had to look at all the office's policies, but they're trying to have a uniform policy. So here I definitely think that could be an issue with multiple different agencies, have a different whistleblower program, multiple different district U.S. attorney's offices have different whistleblower programs.

00;16;56;16 - 00;17;20;23

Christina Moore

And how is it going to be clear to a potential whistleblower where to go, who to talk to? I mean, is first is going to be so critical. Then where do you go to be first in line? I don't know. I mean, that to me is going to be really important. And so there's still just a lot of information that I think is not at all clear to anybody.

00;17;20;23 - 00;17;41;06

Christina Moore

But as you talked about, the confidentiality of it is also going to be really important and how they're going to protect that and whether, you know, if there's so many different programs and then it's confidential, it also just goes to how can that can be coordinated. We all know that. I mean, working in the government, I think a lot of times people just think that the right hand knows what the left hand is doing.

00;17;41;06 - 00;17;56;03

Christina Moore

But most of the time that's not the case. Most of the time that you could have multiple different agencies in multiple different U.S. attorney's office dealing with the same issue. And it also just creates another level of confusion and complication.

00;17;56;26 - 00;18;19;19

Gregg Sofer

And I think this whole idea of sort of racing to the well, wherever you're racing to, you've just raised not even clear where you're racing to get money. All of this is going to be in terms of track and field, I guess, in this episode. But you don't know where you're racing to. You don't know who else is out there racing to the same place or a different place.

00;18;19;19 - 00;18;45;29

Gregg Sofer

As you point out, it's not clear yet whether this has to go through the FBI. Is it going through other federal agencies within even the Department of Justice, which has multiple federal agencies? Is a whistleblower permitted to go straight to the United States attorney's office that the prosecutors versus the agencies? Ordinarily, the cases initiated inside the agency. So that's going to have to all be coordinated, but they're going to have a race to go somewhere.

00;18;47;06 - 00;19;16;27

Gregg Sofer

And I think that just the concept that they're pushing so hard, it's sort of like a key, Tammy, the key to him, folks have got to hurry up and get a case filed or if they're second, then they're out there so well, and that's no good for them. And you're trying to do the same thing here. Again, the department really trying to motivate the corporate entities and all the people that work in them to inform on their own companies as fast as possible to relieve the department.

00;19;17;16 - 00;19;49;12

Gregg Sofer

I think from having to go in and do proactive investigations. But this concept of pushing people to do it first, which I guess you have to do as a whistleblower program, otherwise you'd be paying five or $6 million to five or six different people came in at different times. It also risked a number of the things that we've talked about already, but also other things like the fact that it's going to be a hodgepodge, potentially of uncoordinated reports about one or two concepts.

00;19;49;12 - 00;20;13;14

Gregg Sofer

And as you point out, there could be a case in New York and Washington, D.C., and in Missouri. At the same time, there is with the FBI and then the SCC with its programs. And if it's a publicly traded company, it could be investigating already. It's just a giant. You're right. Everyone assumes the government's this monolithic, well coordinated concept.

00;20;13;14 - 00;20;38;01

Gregg Sofer

And I think it makes with all of this, especially when they're sprinting to do this and then causing the whistleblowers to sprint, it actually looks like mayhem to me on some level. And I find it again, I find it really amazing that they do this without properly resourcing the investigators and the prosecutors to actually follow up on any of it.

00;20;38;01 - 00;20;58;17

Gregg Sofer

So it just it seems a little bit like a political stunt to me more than it is an actual meaningful concept. But I hate to say something like that, but I do think that that's what it feels like to me. Hopefully they'll get their act together and when they get when they finish with the sprint, they'll slow down a little bit and coordinate it.

00;20;58;29 - 00;21;22;01

Gregg Sofer

Let me just one more idea for you, which is this idea that prosecutors and agents want, given a whistleblower complaint, become sort of part committed to the project. They use a poker term, which I know, Christine, you like to play poker. You probably would destroy me in poker. I seem to lose every time I go out and play these days.

00;21;22;19 - 00;21;35;22

Gregg Sofer

But I'm curious what you think about this. We talked a little bit about this before we started recording today, and I'm interested in your thoughts about the idea that once you're in for a penny, you're in for a pound on an investigation.

00;21;35;22 - 00;21;58;04

Christina Moore

Yeah. And hopefully that's not the case. I mean, I'm really hopeful that a lot of prosecutors don't get committed and just throw those who don't play poker, essentially. You know, when you get a lot of your money in a particular hand, it's very, very difficult to lay down what you think is a really good hand. And so your part committed and have to see the cards to the end.

00;21;58;04 - 00;22;39;06

Christina Moore

And I'm hopeful that prosecutors aren't like that in the sense that you would think that at any given time they could review additional evidence and maybe change their mind and not just have that confirming bias, but to continue with the case. But I feel like it's just human nature. If you're spending a significant amount of time investigating a company on some kind of whistleblower tip that you could get, you know, committed, and it may be that particular tip doesn't lead you to where you want to go and maybe you'll get wind of something else and then take the investigation into to another area of the law, another area that you've gotten discovery on.

00;22;39;16 - 00;23;01;24

Christina Moore

And then you find something else that the company has maybe some wrongdoing. But I think sometimes that happens when the investigator, they spend a lot of time on the case and they maybe even have just a bad feeling about a company and they want to just continue continue until they find the case. I think that happens. Unfortunately. I don't think that's what we want our prosecutors to do.

00;23;01;24 - 00;23;18;23

Christina Moore

But I think that that's human nature and that's that they sometimes just follow that what they think is their gut feeling about something. And they may take a tip that has no, you know, there's nothing there there. But they may go to something else and find something.

00;23;19;21 - 00;23;52;08

Gregg Sofer

Yeah. I mean, again, we're doing this for a living. I never really realized when I was in the government the impact of even just one subpoena or one request for interview on a company, for instance. I mean, not fully. I then I never really saw that until moving over into private practice and the burden that that puts on the company and the interruption and disruption of their business, particularly in a medium or small company, but even a very large corporation, is just amazing, the amount of money and time and effort that has to go into fielding.

00;23;52;20 - 00;24;14;06

Gregg Sofer

Oh, my God. Oh my God. The government, especially the Department of Justice, is interested in what we're doing. A It causes massive disruption. And as you point out, on the on the government side, once they've started down the road, many times they'll get something that's different. They'll start pulling on a string. And it turns out that wasn't the one that they really want to follow up on.

00;24;14;08 - 00;24;48;26

Gregg Sofer

They find something else. And companies are engaged in responding to this for years, many times, and millions of dollars in legal fees, not to mention the kind of resources that have to go in internally and that gets them away from doing the kinds of things that we were talking about, which is developing an internal program that can do all of this, where it can be controlled and dealt with internally by having the government come in from the outside is extraordinarily disruptive, even in terms of building your compliance program and your culture because you're so busy triaging the problem.

00;24;48;26 - 00;25;13;09

Gregg Sofer

It's it's the biggest problem you potentially have is Department of Justice is about to knock on our doors, as Lisa monaco says, that scares the heck out of people. And then on the flipside, I think by increasing the number of whistleblower complaints, the department almost has to look at many of them, because if they don't, there's now a record of this request.

00;25;13;15 - 00;25;35;24

Gregg Sofer

And the whistleblower, for instance, can come and have a press conference with his or her attorney. When it turns out that there was a whistleblower complaint on some gigantic Ponzi scheme or banking problem, or it doesn't really matter what it is, God forbid it's a case like the Jeffrey Epstein or something where people are actually potentially being hurt or harmed physically.

00;25;36;16 - 00;26;01;20

Gregg Sofer

Then you end up with this record out there and we see this all the time. We're used to see it all the time in the national security realm where something would happen and people would say, Oh, that person was on the FBI's radar screen. Right? And the same thing could be true here. So going back to the committee concept, you almost also have to you have to protect your chips, all your chips a little bit by being the flop.

00;26;01;20 - 00;26;32;07

Gregg Sofer

It will be another another for another poker analogy. You have to it's hard not to follow up on these because of the potential for a political problem. Should that case be the biggest case or people, people's livelihoods or savings be at risk? And the government did nothing. And you got to be very careful about that. Again, I'd like to say that prosecutors aren't political in any way, shape or form in the sense that they're protecting the potential downside of the case, going wrong or not being brought.

00;26;32;07 - 00;26;49;22

Gregg Sofer

But that's just not realistic. That's not what happens, because there's so much criticism that gets thrown at the Department of Justice for not following up on something if it turns out that it's got broader implications. Anything else, Christina, that you think our listeners, particularly our clients here, should be thinking about?

00;26;50;02 - 00;27;17;05

Christina Moore

I mean, I think always thinking about your compliance program and always trying to evaluate your compliance program and making sure that it is that the people know where to go. I mean, you don't want the same problem with the deal. You want people to know where to go if they have an issue. And I also think it's really important that, you know, you give different avenues for people to go, whether it's a hotline, whether it's some kind of app on their phone, whether it's, you know, not the actual the actual physical door.

00;27;17;11 - 00;27;46;13

Christina Moore

You know, anything that sounds welcoming and inviting for people to talk to your compliance. But I think it's also really important to make sure that you follow up and communicate with somebody. If someone really, truly believes that there is some kind of wrongdoing or something that's going down, it's really important that you make sure that you are following up with them, telling them, you know what's going on, that you don't want them to get frustrated and go to, you know, like DOJ whistleblower program or something like that.

00;27;46;19 - 00;27;46;26

Christina Moore

Yeah.

00;27;47;05 - 00;28;26;07

Gregg Sofer

By shutting the door and not making yourself and the correct people available in the company, you certainly motivate whistleblowers. But in the face of these increasingly profitable, I'll say whistleblower programs, you're fighting that also. So forget making your employee feel like garbage for not following up with them when they when they bring something to your attention. Now they've got potential sprint, to use DOJ's words, to go get $1,000,000, you need to fortify that program as much as possible because there's a lot of reasons why someone might skip coming to you at this point.

00;28;26;27 - 00;28;50;16

Gregg Sofer

It's a gift in some ways to have someone from inside the company bring you a potential problem. You do have to sift through the good and the bad and the real and not real and disgruntled in the not disgruntled kind of issues. But it's a tremendous gift and not accepting that gift and following up on it the right way in the face of a program like this is going to cause you potential massive problems.

00;28;50;16 - 00;28;52;10

Gregg Sofer

So I think you're absolutely right.

00;28;52;27 - 00;29;10;25

Christina Moore

To use that. W Monaco's I mean, you want your employees to knock on your door before the DOJ knocks on her door. I mean, I definitely think that that's what you're wanting. That's the goal. But these programs are hopefully not causing them to come to you. You just want them to be able to come to you so that the DOJ doesn't come to you.

00;29;10;29 - 00;29;14;08

Gregg Sofer

Yes. Or knock that are knocking on. They might be knocking down.

00;29;14;08 - 00;29;14;26

Christina Moore

Yeah, that's.

00;29;14;26 - 00;29;22;25

Gregg Sofer

True. Another big problem. Yeah, I will. Thank you so much, Christina, for coming on. Really appreciate your insight and and your time.

00;29;23;02 - 00;29;27;01

Christina Moore

Thanks a lot. I love to play poker with you some time, I'm afraid.

00;29;27;01 - 00;29;28;19

Gregg Sofer

Already, though. Maybe not.

00;29;29;03 - 00;29;42;02

Gregg Sofer

Thanks for joining us on The Justice Insiders. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please go to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts to subscribe, rate and review the Justice Insiders. I'm your host, Gregg Sofer.

00;29;42;02 - 00;29;51;13

Gregg Sofer

And until next time, be well.

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Gregg N. Sofer

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