On July 8, 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division (“Antitrust Division”) announced a new “Whistleblower Rewards Program” to incentivize individuals to report criminal antitrust violations and related offenses. The announcement comes on the heels of similar whistleblower programs adopted by the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice in 2024. Increased incentives for antitrust whistleblowing create heightened risks for companies that discover problematic conduct, particularly with respect to difficult decisions on whether to self-report the conduct or instead to focus exclusively on addressing the conduct internally.
Key Takeaways from the Antitrust Whistleblower Program
The Whistleblower Rewards Program creates the potential for significant rewards for individuals that report qualifying conduct. When the Antitrust Division determines an award is appropriate, the presumptive award will be at least 15% of the recovered criminal fine, with a possibility that the award could be as much as 30% of the recovered fine. Antitrust fines can be substantial because they are typically set between 20% and 40% of the sales that were affected. For example, if an individual reports an antitrust violation that involved $20 million in sales over a three-year conspiracy, the criminal fine could be between $4 and $8 million, meaning the whistleblower will stand to collect a reward between $600,000 and $2.4 million.
The new Whistleblower Rewards Program has a few important limitations. Most importantly, the Program will be funded through a statute that allows the United States Postal Service (“Postal Service”) to pay whistleblowers a portion of the fines the Postal Service obtains on cases it investigates. Given this statutory limitation, the rewards potentially available to whistleblowers under the new Antitrust Division program are only available for cases that involve “violations of law affecting the Postal Service, its revenues, or property.” This is an important limitation, because whistleblowers motivated by the prospect of obtaining a significant reward will often be uncertain whether the conduct at issue sufficiently “affect[s] the Postal Service.”
An additional limitation on the new Whistleblower Rewards Program is that the conduct at issue must be an “Eligible Criminal Violation,” which the program defines as violations of Sections 1, 2, or 3 of the Sherman Act as well as related offenses that either help participants carry out the reported antitrust violations (such as wire fraud or bribery) or might impede an investigation into the conduct (such as false statements or obstruction). Eligible Criminal Violations also include criminal violations that affect federal, state, and local procurement.
A final wrinkle in the program is that, for a whistleblower to obtain a reward, the reported conduct must result in “a criminal fine of at least $1 million.” Given this wording, it is not immediately clear if the $1 million threshold must be reached as the result of a single resolution or, instead, if that amount can be reached from an accumulation of fines against multiple parties in the same investigation. This is particularly likely to be an issue in procurement cases involving fraud that the Antitrust Division investigates as part of its efforts with the Procurement Collusion Strike Force, since procurement-related fines often do not reach the million-dollar threshold.
The Whistleblower Rewards Program requires that the whistleblower provide original, truthful, and complete information to the Antitrust Division. Significantly, the program excludes certain information from the definition of “original;” for example, the reporting individual must not have learned the information by virtue of being “an officer, director, trustee, or partner” of the offending company, nor by virtue of being an employee with compliance or auditing responsibilities for the company who learned of the information through their official duties. These limitations are intended to protect the integrity of corporate compliance programs and corporate reporting processes. However, this limitation ceases to apply after 120 days have elapsed since the conduct was learned or reported, presumably to incentivize the reporting of information that corporate leadership makes a calculated decision not to disclose to the Antitrust Division. Additional carveouts allow reporting by officials who learned of the conduct through internal channels if the conduct could result in imminent harm to health care patients or to national security.
Prior Antitrust Cases that May Have Met Whistleblower Requirements
A review of past Antitrust Division criminal prosecutions demonstrates that many criminal antitrust offenses may “affect the Postal Service, its revenues, or property” and thus be eligible under the new program. For example, cases involving price fixing, bid rigging, and collusion with respect to air cargo rates, state Department of Transportation contracts, online DVD sales, asphalt paving contracts, and generic drugs have all been investigated jointly by the Antitrust Division and agents of the Postal Service Office of Inspector General.
The diversity of these cases demonstrates that a broad range of cases may qualify as covered conduct for potential whistleblowers. As a practical matter, however, potential whistleblowers will likely face uncertainty regarding whether the conduct they may report would qualify as affecting the Postal Service.
Potential Impact on Companies
The announced Antitrust Whistleblower program is clearly intended to incentivize individuals with knowledge of potential antitrust violations to report the conduct. This will create additional risk for companies, particularly in instances where there has been an internal report to compliance officials but where the company ultimately chooses to remediate the conduct internally. Reporting employees and, after a period of time, certain corporate officials will be able to report the conduct to antitrust authorities in hopes of obtaining a significant financial reward. This underscores the critical importance for corporate compliance departments to conduct timely and thorough investigations when addressing internal reports of potential antitrust violations and to exercise good judgment when deciding whether to self-report the conduct under Antitrust Division leniency programs.
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