By: Grace Robinson
Legal 500 Law Ethics and Corporate Governance
Professor Dr. Michael T. Hanners
1/25/15
Introduction
James Nordgaard was the head trader at Paradigm Capital Management and C.L King & Associates. His role was to trade institutional and hedge fund products. Paradigm is a New York based investment fund founded by Candace King Weir. She also owns C.L. King. C.L. King is a broker-dealer firm. James Nordgaard informed his management of a conflict of interest and a compliance violation between the two companies. Management decided to do nothing about James’ discovery. James had to decide what to do next. Should he have loyalty to Paradigm or loyalty to his professional …show more content…
This act was established to prevent publically traded company fraud. This law came to pass because of the housing and economic crisis. The only problem was encouraging employees to report the fraud. The Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 was amended to encourage employees (U.S. Securities and Exchange Comission, 2014). Whistleblowers are employees who decide to report unethical or illegal activities (Halbert & Ingulli, 2012). The Whistleblower Protection Act provides protection from company retaliation against employees who report misconduct and fraud (National Science Foundation, 2014). The law also promises between 10 to 30 percent of any fines that are $1 million or …show more content…
The Enron scandal is a big reason the United States’ economy had a meltdown. James did his part in preventing another scandal. He also showed management loyalty by giving them a chance to fix the problem on their own. Management most likely didn’t do anything because James had more to lose if he did report them.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act provides some protection to whistleblowers to reduce the loss. The anti-retaliation provision was added to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to penalize an employer for discharging, demoting, suspending, harassing, or otherwise discriminating against an employee for reporting potential violations to the SEC (Deakins, Campbell, & Ferrantella, 2014).
The SEC decided to enforce this provision for the first time for the James Nordgaard. Because James decided against resigning, the company retaliated against him (Deakins, Campbell, & Ferrantella, 2014). The company took away his rights to trade and access to the company’s system. James couldn’t even get into his email. They moved him into a little room and eventually found a way to accuse him of violating the company’s confidentiality agreement. On August17, 2012, James resigned, and he sued the company for violating his