The FBR Award Journal

Exclusive content on bribery, corruption, whistleblowers and corporate accountability.

IT Whistleblower Gets $3.5 Million For Reporting Excessive Travel

Article by John Peterson, Managing Attorney, FBR. 

Technology has come a long way in the last decade but IT support hasn’t changed: “Have you tried turning it off, then turning it on again?”  For one proud IT worker, the days of answering beleaguered calls for tech support may be over after taking home a cool $3.5 million whistleblower bounty for reporting excessive travel at Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR).   

Juniper Networks is an IT company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, that sells equipment like internet routers. Juniper ran into trouble when a whistleblower reported that the company had devised a scheme to pay for luxurious vacations for government officials in Russia and China.  Under a U.S. law called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) this type of conduct is usually considered a bribe, and led to Juniper settling FCPA charges for $11.7 million with the SEC.  The whistleblower who provided information appears to have got the full 30% whistleblower bounty for reporting, a total award of $3.5 million. 

The Scheme 

The story of how Juniper employees paid for the trips is an FCPA story we have all heard before: Juniper employees in Russia and China told their bosses that they needed to offer discounts on their products in order to make sales. The bosses agreed to lower prices, but the employees never reduced prices, continuing to charge customers full price and passing on discounted profits to their bosses.  The employees did this with the help of a “channel partners” (usually a distributor) who kept the extra profit in a slush fund for the employees to use.

Once the employees had topped up the slush fund, they used it to give government officials in China and Russia sight-seeing trips to Italy, Portugal and the U.S.  According to the SEC, even though senior management at Juniper found out about the scheme, their efforts to shut it down were “ineffective” and the scheme continued for at least 3 years after it was discovered.  This led the SEC to order Juniper to pay a fine of $11.7 million, of which $3.5 million went to the IT worker who reported the conduct.  The SEC credited the whistleblower, who was not a U.S. national, with assisting the investigation and even travelling to meet U.S. investigators to help uncover the fraud. 

Sound Familiar? 

A whistleblower award is given to the person who provides information to the SEC first, so if anything in this article sounds familiar, act fast.  If you’d like to learn whether you might qualify for a whistleblower award take our online evaluation here or speak to an FCPA whistleblower attorney free of charge.

John Peterson

New York attorney John Peterson has a decades’ worth of expertise covering the FCPA, whistleblower and securities laws, and regularly contributes to major media outlets such as Reuters, MSN, and Bloomberg. John leads the FBR team, and uses his experience from nearly a decade of working on corporate crime and corruption cases, to represent clients in multi-national investigations involving the SEC, DoJ, FBI, and more. As one of the only whistleblower attorneys focusing specifically in FCPA reporting, John has a long history of helping clients report millions of dollars in corrupt payments. Email FBR for a free, anonymous consultation with John.

How To Report FCPA Violations

Reporting FCPA violations to the wrong people or in the wrong way can have severe consequences for a whistleblower.  If you are considering becoming an FCPA whistleblower, follow our guide on how to report FCPA violations

What Is The FCPA?

Have you head of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act at work?  In this guide we explain what is the FCPA and how you could claim a whistleblower award for reporting FCPA violations

How To Become A Crypto Whistleblower

Regulators are regulating fraud, crime and scams involving cryptocurrency.  If you have information on any of these topics, you could get a whistleblower reward for becoming a crypto whistleblower

drnayyar@fbr.org.uk

× Speak Confidentially via WhatsApp