Since the Watergate scandal, whistleblowing has evolved from a career-ending decision to a legally regulated mechanism for exposing corporate misconduct. In my 2025 BHC paper, I will set out how whistleblowing now plays a crucial role in exposing white collar crime through co-opting the modern corporation to regulate itself.
Corporate whistleblower protections historically lagged behind state legislation in the United States, For example, Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 False Claims Act, rewarded individuals who exposed fraud by military contractors. Yet before the 1970s, corporate employees routinely faced retaliation for exposing wrongdoing. This substantially changed after the Watergate scandal, which revealed not only widespread political corruption but also corporate malpractice in the defense industry. In response, Congress passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) in 1977, outlawing corporate bribery.
At the turn of the 21st century, a series of high-profile scandals in leading public companies led to strengthened whistleblower protection. In 1996, Jeffrey Wigand, a former executive at Brown & Williamson, revealed how tobacco executives had strategically manipulated nicotine levels in cigarettes and, in 2001, Sherron Watkins exposed Enron’s fraudulent accounting. As a result of these giant scandals, the American Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002 to strengthen legal protections for corporate whistleblowers.
The push for whistleblower protection did not stop at the American borders. In 2015, Antoine Deltour and Raphaël Halet revealed secret tax avoidance deals with multinational corporations in Luxemburg. The European Union responded by adopting the “Whistleblower Protection Directive” in 2019, prohibiting EU corporate executives from retaliating against whistleblowers.
By historicizing the key regulatory protections in the U.S. and EU, this paper will highlight the crucial place of whistleblowing in turning senior executives into the central informants against the modern corporation.