Rewarding whistleblowers can’t be done without wider reform

Only 5 per cent of Serious Fraud Office investigations come from whistleblowers; in contrast, in 2022, 86 per cent of penalties imposed by one US enforcement agency originated from whistleblowers. Nick Ephgrave, the director of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), has attributed this difference to the financial incentives available in the US. Without any incentive to blow the whistle in the UK, hundreds of whistleblowers go abroad, meaning that “we don’t deliver the same level of money back to the UK Treasury to fund the things we all care about … the health service, fixing potholes in the road, defence”... Ephgrave made his observations at the launch of a research paper last month from the Royal United Services Institute that considered whistleblower reward programmes in the US and Canada and evaluated them against historic concerns about such schemes. Ephgrave described the research as presenting an “unanswerable case” for reform.