Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Ragi, and my guest today is Patrick Gushu.

Patrick is the acting director of the Department of Justice's new corporate whistleblower

awards pilot program, which we're discussing today.

And he is a trial attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice in the Bank Integrity Unit. Patrick, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you for having me, Alexander. Can you start by taking us through this new program, what it is,

and to the extent that it's not obvious from the name, the goal of

this pilot program. Just at the outset, I just want to let you know, the views I expressed today

are my own and don't necessarily reflect those of the department. So with that, I'm happy to describe

the program, how we got here, what the program sits out to do, and really kind of what our expectations are

over the next couple of years here with the pilot program. So earlier this year, the deputy

attorney general Lisa Monaco tasked a group of prosecutors within the criminal division at the

Department of Justice to study whistleblower issues. There was this understanding that whistleblower programs,

based on what we've seen, have been extremely successful in other U.S. government agencies,

you know, whether we're looking at SEC, CFTC, the False Claims Act space, and also with

Finsen, with its fairly, you its fairly recent AML program that was implemented

about four years ago. There is this understanding that these whistleblower programs can jumpstart

and really supercharge our investigations. Earlier this year, we embarked on what's called a 90-day

sprint, where essentially myself and a few other prosecutors within the fraud section and the money laundering

section where I am, we spoke to experts. We spoke to around 50 stakeholders across the U.S.

government and other federal whistleblowing offices. We also spoke to practitioners and experts in the field,

you know, the white collar defense bar,

...