WASHINGTON – Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), co-founder and co-chair of the Senate Whistleblower Protection Caucus, welcomed the Supreme Court’s 9-0 decision in Murray v. UBS Securities LLC to reject a heightened burden of proof standard for corporate whistleblowers claiming employer retaliation. Today’s ruling upheld the text of the whistleblower provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act as Congress intended by stating that the heightened requirement for whistleblowers to prove retaliatory intent had no lawful basis.
“Corporate whistleblowers can breathe a sigh of relief after today’s ruling,” Grassley said. “Requiring whistleblowers to show direct retaliatory intent would have been outside the text dictated by current law and common sense. Today’s unanimous Supreme Court decision upholds the text as Congress intended, and encourages future whistleblowers at publicly-traded companies to come forward and report wrongdoing when they see it.”
Grassley and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), fellow Whistleblower Caucus co-chair, last year submitted an amicus brief calling on the Supreme Court to uphold the text as Congress had written. Grassley co-authored the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989, which forms the basis for the burden of proof statute at issue in this case.
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