SOX Whistleblowers Protection

Last spring Chalace Epley Lowry reported  what she believed could have been insider trading by a senior executive at Wal-mart and then found herself looking for a new job.

According to a recent article in Buiseness Week, soon after she reported her  complaint Lowry’s identity as the whistleblower was disclosed to the boss she was complaining about.  Wal-Mart told Business Week that  Lowry agreed to the disclosure, but Lowry disagrees. A distressed Lowry said it was impossible to remain in her  department after the disclosure.  When she  asked to be transferred Lowry reported that she was told she had 60 to 90 days to find another position at the company.

Four months later, Lowry has a full-time job at Wal-Mart headquarters. But her job search was any thing but easy.  She thinks that the stress of the situation  contributed  to a  recent diagnosis of “stress-induced angina”  and to the breakup of her marriage. “The past four months have been very hard and, in my opinion, unfair to an honest, 51-year-old woman who chose to do the right thing,”  Lowry reported to Business Week.

While she was looking for a job within Wal-Mart, Lowry on Sept. 5 filed a whistleblower complaint with the Occupational Safety & Health Administration. OSHA administers whistleblower protections under the Corporate & Criminal Fraud Accountability Act of 2002, better known as Sarbanes-Oxley or SOX. 

Around mid-August, Lowry was moved to assist a legal team of two attorneys in Wal-Mart’s human resources group, known as the People division. On Oct. 1, Lowry was informed that her job is no longer temporary and she could work there full-time. Lowry told Business Week “I guess I should consider myself lucky at this point, but all of this should never have happened. I still feel I’m under the microscope.”

One of the two attorneys that Lowry will be working for is Sharon Butcher. She was the attorney at Enron who was given the task of handling Sherron Watkins’ request for reassignment to a new position after Watkins wrote a memo to then-CEO Ken Lay questioning the company’s accounting.

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