Paul DeCamp Quoted in “Business Assault on DOL Judges Begins with Whistleblower Claims”

Paul DeCamp, Member of the Firm in the Employment, Labor & Workforce Management practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, was quoted in the Bloomberg Law Daily Labor Report, in “Business Assault on DOL Judges Begins with Whistleblower Claims,” by Rebecca Rainey.

Following is an excerpt:

A pair of lawsuits filed by Perdue Farms and Comcast Corp. that seek to have whistleblower claims heard before a court instead of US Labor Department in-house judges are the first signs of what attorneys expect will be a flurry of challenges to the agency’s internal tribunals.

Both cases cite the US Supreme Court’s June ruling in SEC v. Jarkesy, where the high court majority said defendants have a constitutional right to make their case to a federal jury when the Securities Exchange Commission is seeking financial penalties, as opposed to before an administrative law judge. …

Future Challenges

While both lawsuits seeking to have the whistleblower cases sent to a full court are in the early process of briefing, attorneys expect similar arguments to be lodged against the DOL.

The agency uses ALJs for a number of different reasons, according to Paul DeCamp, a management-side attorney with Epstein Becker Green, ranging from whistleblowers, federal contractor debarment cases, to civil money penalty assessments. But the full impact of the Jarkesy ruling on the judges overseeing these actions won’t be fully realized until tested in court.

“Those claims are going to be now potentially up in the air in terms of whether the ALJs have the authority to deal” with them, he said. “There’s a lot of litigation that’s going to happen as the courts flesh out which claims precisely should have been in court and which ones should not.”One of the main concerns raised by the recent Jarkesy ruling is the potential impact on cases involving investigations and enforcement actions by the Department of Labor (DOL). The agency commonly utilizes Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) in a variety of situations, including cases related to whistleblowers, federal contractor debarment, and civil money penalty assessments.