Getting the Truth into the Right Hands
/
Whistleblowing, says Tom Devine, isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s existed for as long as there’s been an organized society. Devine, the 2025 recipient of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners’ (ACFE) Cliff Robertson Sentinel Award, told attendees during the Tuesday morning General Session at the 36th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference, that as long we have had an organized society, we have had people intent on breaking rules and people who believed in doing the right thing and calling out the rule breakers.
Some famous whistleblowers throughout history, says Devine, include Socrates, Jesus Christ, Galileo and Copernicus.
According to Devine, whistleblowers are “those people who use free speech rights to challenge abuses of power that betray the public trust.”
Devine spent his career defending and protecting whistleblowers. As legal director for the Government Accountability Project for 46 years, Devine says his mission has been “Getting the truth into the right hands.”
During his session, Devine described some of the services that he and the Government Accountability Project provide for whistleblowers, including:
Defending them against retaliation.
Investigating their charges.
Standing in solidarity with other whistleblowers and investigations.
According to Devine, freedom of speech is key to whistleblowing, but it also puts whistleblowers in a bind. “It counts the most, but it puts whistleblowers in a situation that most of them never wanted because they must choose between valid but contradictory values that we're all raised with,” he told attendees. “They have to decide, ‘Which one of those values am I willing to risk my professional life for?’”
As Devine said, we are all raised to be good team players and to cooperate. Nobody likes naysayers and troublemakers, even if we do not have much respect for people who go along to get along. “We admire rugged individualists, people who are true to themselves.”
As he said, people do not like “tattletales” and “squealers.”
Devine describes many of his clients as “patriots who couldn’t sleep at night” with the information — the truth — they had. “I think we all have a do-gooder gene. We like the world to be a better place because we were there. They have to be true to themselves.”
He talked about how for many of his whistleblowing clients, if they didn’t act on their knowledge, “it would be like a cancer eating up their soul, especially if something went wrong.”
During his keynote, Devine honored his clients and described their brave acts. Clients like John Anderson, Comptroller of the U.S. Army, “who followed the money to learn that there was a secret illegal airbase that was being constructed with illegal funds in Nicaragua,” or the corporate and field auditors who “exposed the truth about a nuclear powerplant in Cincinnati, Ohio, that was being built in systematic violation of almost every nuclear safety law in the book and was an accident waiting to happen.” Because of their efforts, construction of the facility was canceled. Or David Graham of the FDA, who forced the removal of the painkiller, Vioxx, from the market after he showed that it had caused 50,000 fatal heart attacks.
“In every one of those cases that I talked about, they're part of a broader legal campaign. But the foundation of all of them was a partnership,” Devine explained. He also credited fraud examiners for their role in the partnership, “With you folks getting the evidence into the hands of the auditors, the accounts of the investigators, the inspectors, the compliance officers and the people who cared about following the truth wherever it was going to lead them.”
Devine closed his keynote speech with this message: “There are other truths that I’ve learned from working with whistleblowers,” he said. “In a free society, there’s nothing more powerful than the truth.”
