Regardless, and despite the legal protections, you still need to be careful about turning in your boss. First, if you are acting on a grudge or you just don’t like the way your boss treats you, stop right here.
“If they think, ‘My manager is just a bad person, he’s mean, he yells, I’m going to complain about it,’ that’s great and that’s fine, but that won’t give you legal protection against retaliation,” Marzigliano said. “So the first step is to really identify and make sure that the complaints that are being made are considered protected under the law.”
Still want to go forward? Here are some tips.
Know where to complain
Wherever possible, follow your company’s procedure for reporting potential wrongdoing. That will help preserve your rights as a whistleblower.
“Complain to your boss, to HR, to compliance, to legal, to really escalate this up to the chain of command and make a formal complaint about what you believe in good faith to be a violation of the law,” Marzigliano said.
If you don’t feel comfortable working within your company’s channels, you could go directly to the authorities. That could be police, your state’s attorney general, the FBI, or in the case of publicly traded companies, the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Another feature of the Dodd-Frank law was the creation of the SEC’s Office of the Whistleblower, which collects tips from employees and other members of the public about potential securities law violations. If the SEC recovers money as a result, you could be entitled to a portion of the proceeds. To date, the office has awarded more than $150 million, including a record single award of $30 million in 2014. As required by the law, the recipient — like all whistleblowers — is anonymous.
Do not take the law into your own hands
A common misconception is that you must have proof of the fraud before you complain.
“All they need is a reasonable good faith belief that it exists,” Marzigliano said.
That means you have witnessed conduct or seen documents that lead you to honestly suspect that a violation has occurred — even if you don’t know the specific law or regulation that you think may have been violated.
Then, leave the investigation to the investigators.
“They should never take documents from the employer because it opens up a whole can of worms,” Marzigliano said. “A lot of legal issues, they can be accused of theft of property.”
That may even include your own e-mails, which could be considered company property. If in doubt, ask your company’s legal department. If you don’t feel comfortable with that, consider consulting with an attorney of your own.
Be a good worker
Resist the temptation to slack off because you resent your boss’s conduct. You may be giving him an opening to get around the antiretaliation laws.
“Now all of a sudden you gave them a legitimate reason to let you go because you slacked off, because you didn’t care about what you were doing, because your report was sloppy, because you didn’t get work in on time, because you didn’t show up for a meeting,” Marzigliano said. “It’s important to continue to work really hard. To do the best job. To be the best employee that you can be. And to get that information to the right people, so they can take care of it and they can investigate it.”
In the case of Stratos, it took a celebrity’s ex-wife to finally bring him down. A good whistleblower might have been able to do the job much sooner, and save victims millions of dollars.
See how con artist Troy Stratos finally met his match on an all new episode of “American Greed” on Monday, July 10 at 10 p.m. ET/PT only on CNBC.