Hong, a former managing director for an RBS subsidiary, reported wrongdoing at RBS to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2014. He says he provided thousands of documents and internal RBS emails to investigators as part of his testimony.
Hong says the SEC handed his evidence off to other agencies—the DOJ and the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) among them—which each used it to launch successful investigations against RBS. But the SEC never launched its own investigation, nor did it participate in the DOJ or FHFA investigations.
That leaves Hong without a way to apply for a reward, since of the three agencies, only the SEC has a whistleblower reward program. He has filed a petition for review in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit against the DOJ and SEC seeking some compensation for his testimony.
