Following the Enron scandal, the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act was supposed to protect corporate whistleblowers against retaliation from their employers. The Wall Street Journal’s Jennifer Levitz reports that is not the case: out of the 1,273 cases brought before the Labor Dept. where whistleblowers allege retaliations, in only 17 of them has government ruled in favor of the whistleblower.

The reason seems to be that the Dept. of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which handles whistleblower cases, doesn’t seem to believe that Sarbanes-Oxley applies to subsidiaries of corporations. So hundreds of cases have been dismissed because they actually involve a parent company’s subsidiary.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) logically argues that the spirit of Sarbanes-Oxley is not just to protect whistleblowers from the mothership company. "Otherwise," Leahy told the Journal, "a company that wants to do something shady, could just do it in their subsidiary."-MB

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