Gregory (Greg) Keating and Daniel J. Green, attorneys in the Employment, Labor & Workforce Management practice, in the firm’s Boston and New York offices, respectively, were quoted in SHRM, in “New Whistle-Blowing Law Applies to Internal Complaints,” by Allen Smith.
Following is an excerpt:
The Anti-Money Laundering Act's (AMLA's) whistleblower protections took effect this year and apply to internal complaints as well as those who work in compliance, including auditors and attorneys. The law's broad definitions and large remedies create challenges for employers in affected industries—challenges that should be addressed in strong whistle-blowing policies and well-documented discipline of whistleblowers who also are poor performers. …
"As applied to lawyers, this change poses hard questions of legal ethics," stated Greg Keating, an attorney with Epstein Becker Green in Boston, and Daniel Green, an attorney with Epstein Becker Green in New York City, in an e-mail. "As applied to compliance professionals, it poses moral hazards regarding whether one is investigating compliance concerns as an agent of the employer or in order to collect evidence for a whistleblower bounty." …
Employers should expect that the AMLA "is a harbinger of more whistleblower laws at both the state and federal levels," Keating and Green predicted.
