Press Room

Washington Times. August 20, 2009. White House attorneys have backed away from an effort to weaken legal protections for FBI whistleblowers in a bill now before Congress, according to advocacy groups in negotiations with the Obama administration. Officials from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Government Accountability Project (GAP) and Project on Government Oversight (POGO) […]

In March 2006, an American employee of UBS, Switzerland’s largest bank, sent a confidential letter to a top executive. “I wish to invoke my rights listed under the UBS Whistleblowing Protection for Employees” policy, he wrote. With that, Bradley C. Birkenfeld fired the first shot in the historic and devastating assault on Swiss bank secrecy […]

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)–A key government informant in the U.S. tax investigation of UBS AG’s (UBS) cross-border banking business was sentenced Friday to 3 years and 4 months in prison for helping the Swiss bank’s American clients cheat on their taxes. Former UBS private banker Bradley Birkenfeld, who pleaded guilty in June 2008, was sentenced in […]

Washington Times. August 18, 2009. FBI whistleblower Frederic Whitehurst spent close to a decade fighting the Clinton White House to win limited protections for his brethren in the intelligence community willing to risk their careers to expose wrongdoing. Now critics say the Obama administration is seeking to strip away those protections, and Mr. Whitehurst predicts […]

The Senate is expected to act on the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (S. 372) in September.  The NWC is extremely concerned that this bill, although overall progressive legislation, has a number of provisions which if enacted would harm whistleblowers.  The NWC is urging the Senate to fix these provisions and pass a bill that is […]