On Monday, June 26, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review whether the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA) prohibits retaliation against internal whistleblowers or only covers individuals who report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC).
This question has divided practitioners and lower courts alike since Dodd-Frank’s passage in 2010. As reported in our previous Alert on March 29, 2017, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals widened the circuit split on this question in Somers v. Digital Realty Trust Inc., 850 F.3d. 1045 (9th Cir., March 8, 2017), when it affirmed the district court’s denial of the defendant’s motion to dismiss a DFA whistleblower claim, where the whistleblower had only reported internally.
In Somers, plaintiff alleged that he was terminated based on “vague, trivial and false allegations of misconduct” after he complained to senior management that a senior vice president had allegedly eliminated some internal corporate controls in violation of SOX. The district court denied Digital Realty’s motion to dismiss the DFA claim, but certified the issue for interlocutory appeal. In a divided 2-1 decision, the Ninth Circuit panel followed a previous Second Circuit decision and concluded that the DFA’s reference to certain provisions of the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX) “necessarily bars retaliation against an employee of a public company who reports violations to the boss, i.e., one who ‘provide[s] information’ regarding a securities law violation to a ‘person with supervisory authority of the employee.’” Somers, 850 F.3d. at 1049.