Paid to blow the whistle.
Some governments pay people who report fraud a share of the money their tip brings in. In the United States that has meant awards of more than US$100 million. Elsewhere it is rare and small. Here are the reward programmes we have found so far, how much they pay, and where each number comes from.
All the numbers, sources and downloads in the data portal →
- 18,298
- numbers
- 2,460
- awards and cases
- 582
- documents and articles
- 34
- programmes
False Claims Act: the whistleblowers' share of recoveries (Justice Department statistics). SEC, CFTC, IRS: money paid out in the year, which can include awards decided earlier. Where documents disagree, the line follows the most official, most recent and most precise figure.
Eight things this data tells you
paid by the IRS in 2012 to Bradley Birkenfeld, the UBS banker who exposed how the bank helped Americans hide money in Switzerland. He had also served prison time for his own part in it.
the largest award the SEC has paid to one whistleblower, in 2023. The SEC never names them.
tips a year to the SEC, from fiscal 2020 to fiscal 2025. Most never lead to an award.
is what South Korea now pays for reports of corruption, since September 2026. The cap was ₩200 million when the scheme began in 2002.
paid to informants by the UK tax authority in 2025/26, its most ever. In November 2025 it started a US-style scheme paying 15–30% of big recoveries.
awards paid by the US money-laundering programme (FinCEN) since tips began in 2021, though it got 203 in 2024 alone: its rules aren't final yet.
The largest whistleblower awards on record
34 programmes that reward whistleblowers
More tips, more lawsuits, long waits
The IRS changed how it counts claims more than once; click a point for the definition behind it.
For IRS awards paid in fiscal 2024 under the mandatory rules, the average time from claim to payment was 10.87 years.
Few countries pay, and most pay little
Paid, prosecuted, or ignored
409 laws, rulings and awards
Search and check every number
Free to use, with every source
The whole dataset is on GitHub under CC BY 4.0: 18,298 numbers, 2,460 awards and cases, the reward rules over time and the laws behind them, with stored copies of 558 official documents.
In the data portal you can search, filter and download every table, each row with its source, page and quote.
Every quote was matched against the stored document by a script, or checked by eye where the number sits in a chart. A second AI model re-read a sample of 1,746 numbers from the documents without seeing the first answer; where the two differed, the page itself decided. That caught eight South Korean amounts recorded 100 times too small, now corrected.
Not complete yet. We have not yet extracted every table from every document we store. Each document has a status (not reviewed, partial, complete) in the coverage file, and gaps are listed as to-dos.