One unexpected fallout from remote work: a huge surge in whistleblower complaints
EHStockphoto/Shutterstock; Rachel Mendelson/Insider
Why are so many remote workers deciding to squeal on their companies?
When Simon Edelman blew the whistle on his former employer, the US Department of Energy, he couldn't have known that his act of defiance was at the forefront of a growing national trend.
In 2017, Edelman was a photographer for the DOE. As the department was moving forward with a series of new rules that would have boosted the coal industry, he decided to anonymously leak photographs to the progressive news site In These Times of a meeting between the Energy Secretary Rick Perry and the CEO of one of the country's largest coal companies. The photos showed the executive presenting DOE officials with a pro-coal regulatory plan and giving Perry, a former governor of Texas, a hug. The day after the photos were published, Edelman was escorted out of the DOE offices, prohibited from taking his personal laptop, and, he says, had his photo equipment taken away.
The department fired Edelman, despite, he says, never investigating or confirming that he was the whistleblower. (Edelman took the photos, but they were uploaded on a shared drive that other employees had access to). Edelman eventually did come forward publicly in a New York Times article in January 2018 and admitted to leaking the photos, saying he wanted to "expose the close relationship between the two men." He also filed a complaint with the department, claiming whistleblower status, a formal designation that protects people who report ethical or legal violations, fraud, abuse, or other wrongdoing inside companies and government agencies from retaliation. Edelman said the department ultimately came up with a settlement that both parties agreed upon.
But after a whirlwind news cycle about his case, Edelman experienced the silent retaliation that dogs many whistleblowers: He couldn't find a job. "They happened to Google my name," he told me of his various interviewers, "and I didn't get a response back."
Edelman's experience as a whistleblower, both the highs and lows, are becoming more common. A series of high-profile whistleblowers have come forward over the past few years: Tyler Shultz and Erika Cheung at Theranos, Frances Haugen at Facebook, Mark MacGann at Uber, and Peiter "Mudge" Zatko at Twitter. And it's not just at big tech companies. The Securities and Exchange Commission — which implemented a whistleblower program in 2011 and where Haugen and others have sent documents — has received a historic jump in complaints over the past few years. In fiscal year 2021, the SEC said it received 12,210 tips, a 76% increase from the year prior and a 300% growth rate since the start of the program. The program broke the record again this fiscal year with over 12,300 tips — a 136% increase from 2019. (For comparison, in fiscal year 2012, the first year the program has data for, it received just 3,000 tips.)
And this surge may not be a coincidence: The extra time and space workers gained from the pandemic and the rise of remote work have caused an environment favorable to whistleblowers, helping to ignite an explosion in complaints.
How remote work sparked a flood of whistleblowers
As the pandemic spread and workers retreated to their makeshift home offices, employees began to reconsider their relationship with work. The space between employer and employee helped many people come to terms with the malfeasance happening at their companies and, eventually, report it. MacGann, the Uber whistleblower, told Politico that it wasn't until the pandemic that he "had time on his hands" to really ponder his decision to come forward about the ride-hailing company's treatment of workers.
Mary Inman, a partner at Constantine Cannon who has been representing whistleblowers for 25 years, told me that virtual work has likely encouraged whistleblowing, because employees haven't developed the same loyalty to their employers as they would in person. "The risks seem farther off when you're in a remote environment," she said. And as workers around the country have reconsidered their jobs and quit in droves, allegiances have shifted. "All that naval-gazing led to people being more willing to undertake the risk that is inherent in blowing the whistle," said Inman.
Joohn Choe worked as a contract disinformation and extremism researcher for Facebook following the Capitol riots on January 6, 2021. While working from home, he discovered that the company was allowing people sanctioned by the US government to continue using the platform even after he raised concerns internally. He eventually grew tired of the company dragging its feet and filed a complaint with the Treasury Department and the Department of Justice. In his complaint, Choe alleged Meta was knowingly violating US sanction laws by not removing the accounts of the sanctioned individuals. While the work-from-home setup was not new for Choe, he understands that the remote environment can "reset your standards about what forms of exploitation you're willing to accept."
"Without those conformity signals of going to the office and having someone look over your shoulder, it ends up being, 'What am I getting out of this job? What is this work doing to me?'" he told me. "And these are questions that are much easier to ask when you're in the stillness of your own home, in the environment of your own mind."
Libby Liu, the CEO of Whistleblower Aid, echoed this idea. Tech companies, she said, often try to foster a familial culture of "groupthink" where the work transcends the individual. This, in turn, creates a situation of social intimidation and peer pressure where employees who go out and "share a secret" are characterized as disloyal or a snitch. Remote work, she explained, helps to remove some of those barriers to whistleblowing.
"If you're in an office all day, every day with everybody else and people who are making the Kool-Aid, drinking the Kool-Aid, buying the Kool-Aid — I think it makes it so much more difficult," she told me.
Teresa Ross first raised concerns about her employer, Group Health Cooperative, back in 2011. When she told her superiors that she believed the company was submitting false insurance claims for Medicare reimbursement, therefore defrauding the government, she was dismissed by leadership and told she wasn't a team player. As a manager, she was also told not to disclose her concerns to her subordinates. When the company eventually brought in a psychologist to meet with her, she told me that "they made me start to question my own sanity." Then, in 2012, she met Inman, the lawyer at Constantine Cannon, and filed a complaint under the False Claims Act alleging Medicare fraud. The case was under seal for eight years, meaning Ross couldn't tell anyone about her case. The government ended up settling for over $6 million.
Whistleblower cases are increasingly ending up like Ross' — with real action and compensation for the tipsters. In addition to the record-breaking number of tips, the SEC whistleblowing program awarded $229 million in 103 cases this year. In fiscal year 2021, that dollar amount was almost double at $564 million, more than the entire amount awarded from 2011 to 2020. According to the agency, these are awards for "providing information that led to the success of SEC and other agencies' enforcement actions." Since the program began in 2011, it has paid out more than $1.3 billion.
A surge of COVID whistleblowers
It's perhaps not surprising that the pandemic helped trigger a whistleblowing boom. In many ways, the public's awareness of COVID-19 was kicked off by a whistleblower: Li Wenliang. An ophthalmologist in Wuhan, China, Li warned colleagues about the virus in December 2019 before being detained by Chinese security forces and accused of "making false comments," spreading rumors, and disturbing "the social order." He died of COVID in February 2020.
In the US, whistleblowing complaints around worker safety increased exponentially during the early days of the pandemic. The US Department of Labor found that the number of complaints filed to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's whistleblower program rose by 30% between February and May 2020.
One such whistleblower was Dawn Wooten. Two years ago, she didn't even know what a whistleblower was. But she did know what she saw and heard while working as a nurse at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia. The center is operated by LaSalle Corrections, a private corporation, and Wooten says that during the height of COVID, she observed cases going unreported to the health department, medical documents being shredded, and masks not being issued to detainees. She started raising concerns internally but said her supervisor turned her away and told her, "Get the hell out of my office."
After being demoted, she found Project South and the Government Accountability Project, which filed complaints to the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General on her behalf. According to the complaint Project South filed, Wooten also alleged that the facility flouted quarantine guidelines, that the warden allowed individuals who had COVID to be transferred to the facility, and that detainees who complained of symptoms were not tested. "I didn't want to be a part of people being treated like animals," she told me. Like Edelman, since she started speaking out in the summer of 2020, Wooten has had difficulty finding long-term work.
Companies cracking down
This growing willingness on the part of everyday people to speak up about wrongdoing at their companies has left many businesses in a precarious position. Ideally, this would lead to a corporate culture shift where employees are able to raise concerns internally without any backlash or fear. But we live in a far from ideal world and experts say the rise in whistleblowing may only cause executives and managers to surveil their workers more.
Kate Kenny, a professor at the University of Galway and a researcher for Whistleblowing Impact, told me that while there is "more consciousness around whistleblowing," the use of "silencing mechanisms" such as keyboard tracking, nondisclosure agreements, and lawsuits against whistleblowers are on the rise. And some companies are going to extremes to monitor remote employees: The use of facial recognition and other monitoring technologies has doubled in the past year, according to a Washington Post report.
In the past decade, more protections and laws have been established to protect and encourage whistleblowers, such as the just-launched Integrity Sanctuary which offers a safe haven in Canada for international whistleblowers. There is also technology like Vault Platform that includes software for whistleblowers to report anonymously. As someone who has worked with whistleblowers for over two decades, Inman believes that the culture shift brought on by the pandemic and remote work could lead to more permanent change. She sees whistleblowers as a necessity — and the reason that companies are now in a vulnerable position.
"You cannot replace the power of a whistleblower insider in helping law enforcement to root out fraud," Inman said.
Britta Lokting is a journalist in New York. She's written for The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, VICE, and elsewhere.
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