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In a landmark unanimous ruling late last week, Murray v. UBS Securities, LLC, et al. 601 U. S. ____ (2024), the U.S. Supreme Court held that whistleblowers do not need to prove their employer acted with "retaliatory intent" to be protected under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Instead, all whistleblower plaintiffs need to prove is that their protected activity was a "contributing factor" in the employer's unfavorable personnel action.
Background
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act is a federal law that was passed in 2002 with the goal of improving auditing and public disclosure in response to several accounting scandals which shook financial markets.
In recognition of the role whistleblowers played in exposing the accounting scandals of the early-2000s, Congress passed Section 806, codified at 18 U.S.C. ' 1514A, which prohibits publicly-traded companies from retaliating against whistleblowing employees. The U.S. Supreme Court in Lawson v. FMR, 571 U.S. 429 (2014), thereafter extended the whistleblower protections in ' 1514A to employees of non-public contractors and subcontractors of a public company.
The language of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act at issue in the Murray v. UBS Securities, LLC case was no employer subject to Sarbanes-Oxley...
