Last week (January 22), Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Acting Chair Caroline Pham announced a slew of leadership changes at the commodities regulator.  Key among them was elevating current head of the CFTC Whistleblower Office Brian Young to Acting Director of the CFTC’s Division of Enforcement.

It is a big move for Young who has been with the agency for less than a year.  He joined last February after long-time Whistleblower Chief Chris Ehrman left the agency.  As we reported at the time, Young came to the CFTC after years of enforcement experience with the Department of Justice, where he served as acting director of litigation for the Antitrust Division and Chief of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Litigation Unit, where he oversaw roughly 150 white-collar prosecutors.

In announcing his recent elevation, Acting Chair Pham pointed to this experience along with Young’s high-profile trial experience on some “the most significant white collar crime matters in the past decade.”  This includes convictions in the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) manipulation case, a conviction of the former head of HSBC Bank’s Foreign Exchange (FX) desk involved in a $3.5 billion “frontrunning” scheme, and the conviction of two Deutsche Bank precious metals traders involved in a $1 billion futures market “spoofing” scheme.

There would seem to be little question that Young is up to the task of taking the reins of CFTC’s enforcement efforts.  Our own experience with Young is consistent with this take.  In all our dealings with Young as CFTC Whistleblower Chief this past year, we have found him to be smart, responsive, engaged, and fully devoted to ensuring the success of the CFTC Whistleblower Program.

And as is evident from the CFTC’s Annual Whistleblower Report, which we recently analyzed, the program has continued to thrive under Young’s relatively short tenure.  In fact, the agency hit several notable whistleblower milestones this past year, including issuing the highest number of whistleblower award orders (12) and receiving the largest number of whistleblower submissions (1,744).

With all this, we are excited with Young’s new appointment.  It remains to be seen whether he will take on this role on a more permanent basis, but as long as he remains in charge of enforcement, we believe the agency is in good hands.  We believe whistleblowers are too.

Young has made his appreciation of whistleblowers very clear.  As he remarked when he joined the agency last year, whistleblowers “are critically important to any financial enforcement program,” and “the tremendous accomplishments of the CFTC’s Whistleblower Program confirm this view.”  It is a sentiment he has reaffirmed repeatedly throughout this past year.

If you would like to learn more about our views of the CFTC Whistleblower Program or what it means to be a CFTC whistleblower, please do not hesitate to contact us.  We will connect you with an experienced member of the Constantine Cannon whistleblower team for a free and confidential consult.

Read CFTC Promotes Whistleblower Chief Brian Young to Acting Head of Enforcement at constantinecannon.com