CFTC Whistleblower Program: rewards of 10% to 30% for commodities and derivatives fraud tips

The CFTC pays people who report fraud and manipulation in commodities, futures, swaps, and derivatives markets. If your tip leads to an enforcement action in which the CFTC orders more than $1 million in sanctions, you can claim 10% to 30% of whatever the CFTC actually collects. Since its first award year in fiscal 2014, the program has granted more than $380 million to more than 70 whistleblowers, according to its annual reports to Congress. Here is who qualifies, what it actually pays, how to file, and the mistakes that cost people their award.

Who qualifies

The rules read almost word for word like the SEC’s program next door, because Congress built both under the same Dodd-Frank section in 2010. Three things have to be true.

First, your tip has to be voluntary. You have to come forward before the CFTC, Congress, another regulator, or law enforcement asks you for the information. A prior request, inquiry, or subpoena on the same subject kills voluntariness, and so does an existing legal or contractual duty you already had to report it.

Second, you need original information: drawn from your own independent knowledge or your own independent analysis, not already known to the Commission from someone else, and not lifted only from a public hearing, a government report, or the news, unless you were the original source of that public material. Independent knowledge is what you learned through your own work, conversations, or observations, not through public sources or attorney-client communications.

Third, your information has to lead to a covered action, meaning the CFTC orders more than $1,000,000 in sanctions in a case your tip caused it to open, reopen, or substantially help. If the ordered sanctions never clear $1 million, there is no award on that action. Once a case clears the bar, your cut is a percentage of what the CFTC actually collects, not the amount it originally ordered.

Officers, directors, trustees, or partners who learn of the misconduct through their company’s own internal processes are presumed not to have independently derived information, and the same goes for employees with compliance or internal audit duties. That presumption drops if any one of these is true: you reasonably believed disclosure was necessary to prevent the company from causing substantial financial injury, you reasonably believed the company was impeding an investigation, or at least 120 days passed since you reported the same information internally, to a supervisor, the audit committee, or company counsel. Separately, current or former employees of the CFTC, another financial regulator, the Justice Department, a registered entity, a self-regulatory organization, or a law enforcement agency cannot collect an award tied to information they got through that job, and anyone convicted of a crime related to the conduct is barred outright.

What it pays

The award sits between 10% and 30% of what the CFTC collects, and only once ordered sanctions in the case top $1 million. Where you land in that range depends on the same kind of factors the SEC weighs: the significance of your information and how much staff time and resources it saved, the degree of help you gave, including ongoing cooperation, explaining complex trades, or pointing investigators to new leads, the law enforcement interest in the case, and whether you used your company’s internal compliance process. Culpability in the underlying conduct, an unreasonable delay in coming forward, or interfering with an internal compliance investigation all push the percentage down.

One feature that surprises people: the award can also cover Related Actions, meaning cases brought by another agency, such as the Justice Department, another regulator, or a state attorney general, when they are based on the same original information you gave the CFTC. A single tip can pay out more than once if it triggers parallel enforcement elsewhere.

The numbers vary sharply by year. The program paid nothing at all in fiscal years 2012, 2013, 2015, and 2017. Then fiscal 2018 brought more than $75 million to five people, including a then-record $30 million award. The all-time record came from a Final Order dated October 21, 2021, awarding almost $200 million to a single whistleblower, the largest CFTC award ever granted; because the order issued in October, it lands in the CFTC’s fiscal year 2022 even though press coverage often calls it “the 2021 award.” See the full year-by-year numbers on our award tracker, alongside the SEC’s. Like the SEC program, CFTC awards are paid from a dedicated Customer Protection Fund financed by sanctions collected from wrongdoers, not from victim restitution or tax dollars.

How to file, step by step

1. Write it down clearly. Organize the who, what, when, and which CEA provisions were violated, plus any documents, before you touch the form.

2. File a Form TCR. Pick one of three routes: the online whistleblower portal (the CFTC’s preferred method), mail to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Whistleblower Office, 1155 21st Street NW, Washington, DC 20581, or fax to (202) 418-5975.

3. Decide on anonymity now. You can submit your Form TCR anonymously, with or without a lawyer. But you can only collect an anonymous award if an attorney represents you, because the Commission has to verify your identity before it pays anyone. If you are weighing this, read do you need a whistleblower lawyer.

4. Leave a way to reach you. Even filing anonymously, an email address or phone number the Commission can use through your attorney helps, since ongoing cooperation factors into your eventual award.

5. Keep your confirmation number. You will need it to file an award claim later and to link any follow-up information to your original tip.

Timeline reality

Think years, not months. After you file, the CFTC decides whether to investigate, and most tips never turn into a case. The ones that do can take years to reach a settlement or a litigated judgment.

Once the CFTC wins an action in which it orders more than $1 million in sanctions, it posts a Notice of Covered Action on its website. That posting starts a 90 calendar day clock to file an award claim on Form WB-APP. Miss it and you forfeit the award, no matter how good your original tip was. The uneven history here is telling: the program paid zero awards in four separate fiscal years, then cleared $75 million in a single year once a backlog of preliminary determinations got finalized. Keep checking the Notices of Covered Action page after you file so a matching case does not slip past your window.

Retaliation protection

Section 23(h) of the CEA makes it illegal for your employer to fire, demote, suspend, threaten, harass, or otherwise discriminate against you for providing information to the CFTC or helping with a related investigation. If it happens, remedies include reinstatement with your original seniority, back pay with interest, and your litigation costs, expert witness fees, and attorney’s fees.

One deadline is easy to miss because it is shorter than you would expect: you generally have only two years from the date of the retaliation to file a private lawsuit over it, a tighter window than the comparable SEC clock. Award eligibility and retaliation protection are separate tests. You do not need to qualify for, or even want, a monetary award to be protected from retaliation.

Common mistakes

Relying on public information. Repackaged news, court filings, or data anyone can pull is not original information.

Waiting too long to come forward. Once a subpoena lands, or the CFTC already has the story from someone else, your tip stops being voluntary.

Missing the 90-day claim window. A Notice of Covered Action posts, the clock runs, and no claim gets filed. This is the most common way people lose money they already earned.

Going anonymous without lining up a lawyer first. You cannot collect an anonymous award without an attorney representing you at the time you claim it.

Sitting on a retaliation claim. Two years passes faster than people expect, especially while a whistleblower is still absorbing the fallout of being fired or sidelined.

Forgetting about Related Actions. If the Justice Department, another regulator, or a state attorney general also brought a case built on information you gave the CFTC, ask the Whistleblower Office about it rather than assuming only the CFTC’s own case counts toward your award.

If your tip is about stocks, bonds, or other securities rather than commodities, futures, swaps, or crypto derivatives, the CFTC may not be the right door. See the SEC whistleblower program for that nearly identical framework.