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In the footsteps of similar initiatives by the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) Criminal Division, the Antitrust Division has announced its first-ever Whistleblower Rewards Program. Extending an established program with the U.S. Postal Service (“USPS”), the program purports to focus on “postal-related antitrust crimes” that “harm consumers, taxpayers, and free market competition across industries from healthcare to agriculture.” While the exact scope of the covered conduct is unclear, the Antitrust Division has signalled it remains focused on the incentives for the reporting of cartel offenses at a time when traditional leniency applications have been declining globally.
As things stand, there is no statutory mechanism in place that would allow the Antitrust Division to issue rewards. As reflected in a Memorandum of Understanding, the Antitrust Division announced this program in partnership with USPS. To get around this hurdle without establishing new law, the Whistleblower Rewards Program leverages USPS’s authority to collect fines, penalties and forfeitures arising out of matters affecting the Postal Service and to pay “one-half of all penalties and forfeitures imposed for violations” to the informant. Given how frequently mail is used in antitrust matters, it should not be difficult for the agencies to identify mailings made in furtherance of a cartel, and therefore justify the involvement of USPS.
The Postal Service is already a key partner of the Antitrust Division’s Procurement Collusion Strike Force, and the two agencies have collaborated closely in the past. For example, USPS assisted the Antitrust Division’s federal antitrust investigation into price-fixing, bid-rigging and other anticompetitive conduct in the generic pharmaceutical industry.
The new Whistleblower Rewards Program complements the Antitrust Division’s longstanding leniency program, which provides self-reporting individuals and organizations with the opportunity to avoid criminal charges for participating in an illegal conspiracy if they are the first to self-report.
Over the past year or so, the DOJ has been busy developing new initiatives to incentivize the voluntary disclosure of corporate crime through whistleblower rewards. Although the use of whistleblower rewards remains rare amongst the world’s major economies, they are increasingly common in the United States.
Last year, the DOJ Criminal Division announced a new Whistleblower Rewards Program to report information about certain types of corporate crime with the prospect of a reward. The program was designed to “fill the gaps” left by the existing patchwork of whistleblower rewards programs in the U.S., originally focused on foreign and domestic corruption, crimes involving financial institutions, and healthcare fraud involving private insurers. The Criminal Division recently updated its Whistleblower Rewards Program in May 2025 to reflect the new administration’s enforcement priorities, including fraud against or deception of the U.S. government, trade, tariff and customs fraud, immigration offenses, and sanctions offenses (see our blog here).
While the impact of this new program remains to be seen, the prospect of a potentially very significant monetary reward may very well incentivize potential informants to pursue voluntary disclosure. In this context, companies should ensure their antitrust compliance programs are up-to-date and reflect the Antitrust Division’s Corporate Compliance Programs in Criminal Antitrust Investigations guidance, which notably indicates that an effective compliance program should allow employees to “report potential antitrust violations anonymously or confidentially and without fear of retaliation.” Beyond merely having a reporting hotline or similar mechanism in place, it is important for companies to ensure that their whistleblower procedures provide for timely review by legal personnel of any complaints that could foreshadow formal whistleblowing.
23 July 2025
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