Employers increasingly face the difficult scenario of employees who misappropriate company data in the pursuit of whistleblower claims alleging misconduct by the employer. Such cases can present a complex mix of regulatory, cybersecurity, and employment issues. These issues were front and center in a recent whistleblower case pitting a bank against its former internal auditor, who engaged in computer-facilitated misappropriation of the bank’s confidential information allegedly to support whistleblower conduct.

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California recently declined to summarily adjudicate whether the employee’s confidentiality agreement precluded any whistleblower affirmative defense based on the employee’s alleged violation of computer fraud, contract, and tort laws. The whistleblower laws in question included the Bank Secrecy Act, Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank, and the California Labor Code.

In Erhart v. Bofi Holding, plaintiff Charles Matthew Erhart filed a whistleblower complaint against his employer, Bank of the Internet (BofI), alleging BofI retaliated against him for reporting unlawful conduct to the government. BofI, in turn, filed a complaint, alleging that Erhart breached his employee confidentiality agreement by misappropriating confidential data relating to his employer and its clients and disseminating that data to the government, family members, and the national press.

Erhart illustrates the complex and practical problems faced by employers dealing with employees who engage in conduct that would otherwise constitute computer fraud, intellectual property theft, breaches of employment-related agreements and policies, and related tort claims under the mantle of “whistleblower.” A key issue in the case was whether Erhart would be entitled to pursue his retaliation claims before a jury or would be precluded from doing so as a matter of law given his computer-facilitated theft of confidential information.
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