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Study shows SEC mounting secrecy about whistleblower program
LAWRENCE — The nation’s leading transparency regulator is facing a transparency crisis of its own. According to a new study by a University of Kansas legal scholar, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is becoming increasingly secretive regarding some of its own activities – even as it is increasingly aggressive in demanding disclosures from private actors.
Ecocritic ponders links between race, environmental crisis in new works
LAWRENCE — A University of Kansas professor of English has contributed two new scholarly works in the environmental humanities: “Sustainable Ordinary,” an article in Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, and “Slavery and the Anthropocene,” a chapter in The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment. Paul Outka’s latter work explores the idea that racial and environmental politics are inseparable.
New podcast with ties to KU research, created by and for Native Americans, provides a platform for discussions on disability and mental health
LAWRENCE — A new podcast titled “Black Feathers,” produced with support from the Kansas University Center on Developmental Disabilities, a part of the KU Life Span Institute, will explore Native American experiences with intellectual disabilities, learning disabilities, mental health, anxiety disorders and health care access, among other topics. It is the only podcast by and for Native Americans focused on intellectual and developmental disabilities, according to the mental health experts who will serve as the program’s co-hosts.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Mike Krings, KU News Service, 785-864-8860, [email protected], @MikeKrings
Study shows SEC mounting secrecy about whistleblower program
LAWRENCE — The nation’s leading transparency regulator is facing a transparency crisis of its own. According to a new study by a University of Kansas law professor, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is becoming increasingly secretive regarding some of its own activities – even as it is increasingly aggressive in demanding disclosures from private actors.
The study by Alexander Platt, associate professor of law at KU, shows how the SEC’s most recent annual report on its whistleblower program is the least transparent in the history of the program.
The whistleblower program encourages people to share information about financial malfeasance with the SEC by offering monetary payments for tips that lead to successful SEC enforcement actions. The program has recently come under fire for its excessive secrecy, which some fear has tilted the playing field in favor of well-connected repeat players. Last summer, one member of the commission cited Platt’s earlier study of the program in a speech calling for increasing transparency surrounding the program.
But rather than expanding transparency, the SEC has done precisely the opposite, according to Platt. As he shows in his new study, which was featured on the Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog, the SEC’s Fiscal Year 2022 report on the whistleblower program omitted a wide range of significant information that had been included in every prior annual report.
This year’s report is the first not to disclose how many insiders and how many outsiders received whistleblower awards. Platt said that, although policymakers tend to emphasize the program’s role in getting individuals to come forward with actionable information about their corporate employers, no employment or other direct connection to the target is necessary to qualify for an award.
“Are whistleblower awards actually incentivizing current employees and other insiders to come forward? Or are they compensating outsiders like activist short-sellers who may have already profited? The public deserves to know,” Platt said.
Similarly, the most recent report is the first to omit information about the extent to which tipsters first reported the fraud internally at their companies before coming forward to the SEC. As Platt wrote, because the whistleblower program does not require individuals to report internally, there has been a steady concern that the program would undermine corporate compliance programs.
Other key information excluded for the first time from the report includes the proportion of awardees whose tips led to the detection of new frauds (as opposed to merely helping prosecute frauds that had already been detected), the number of tips received from each U.S. state and each foreign country, the number of ongoing investigations related to tips received through the program and the staffing of the whistleblower program.
“This report signals a further retreat from the already low levels of transparency the SEC had been providing,” Platt said. “We need to ask why.”
In the absence of an explanation from the SEC, Platt said everyone is left to speculate as to why this information is suddenly being kept secret. One possible reason is agency staffing issues. The SEC’s inspector general recently found that SEC’s aggressive rulemaking agenda under Chair Gary Gensler has compromised “other mission-related work,” with rule-making teams borrowing staff from other areas in the organization to assist them.
“Writing these reports is not necessarily the sexiest task, and perhaps it’s one of the things that has been shortchanged at the expense of higher-profile stuff,” Platt said.
But, Platt said, the transparency gap may also be part of a broader pattern of impatience with traditional mechanisms of participation and accountability, as signaled by the agency’s controversial recent efforts to shorten the public comment period on major rule proposals.
Platt compared the situation to an annual holiday letter providing updates about various family members.
“If you get a letter from someone every December and then one year it just conspicuously fails to mention a spouse or child, you’d probably be a little concerned,” Platt said. “For all its mystery, the FY 2022 report is blindingly transparent about one thing: The SEC is not taking seriously the criticisms that the whistleblower program’s excessive secrecy is a problem.”
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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
Ecocritic ponders links between race, environmental crisis in new works
LAWRENCE — For Paul Outka, associate professor of English at the University of Kansas, the “slow-motion meteor strike” of environmental degradation and the accompanying “sense of looming, but not fully arrived, apocalypse … that unites us all is an ever-increasing precarity” have demanded his scholarly attention.
Those are quotes from his most recent writings in environmental humanities. As life and career took him from New York’s megalopolis to Florida to Maine to Kansas, Outka has moved his attention from individual writers like Walt Whitman to the current crisis.
Hiking in the mountains of Maine and pondering why so many of the people he met on the trail were white led to Outka’s acclaimed 2008 book, “Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance.”
He continues to explore that nexus in his most recent publication, “Slavery and the Anthropocene,” which is a chapter in The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment.
His essay “Sustainable Ordinary,” in the forthcoming 10th anniversary issue of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, is a pandemic-induced appeal in which Outka called COVID-19 lockdowns an “example of a range of recent calamities that I think threaten the ongoing possibility of everyday life for many.”
“I started to feel restive about the kind of language that a lot of my field is engaged in,” Outka said. “I wanted to try to write differently. So that’s a little bit less of an academic piece, for me, at least.”
He said, “Environmental humanities or ecocriticism comes out of this idea that our cultural practice should take seriously how humans and the natural world are related to each other, because that has real effects on the natural world as well as the human.”
One of the field’s foundational moves, he said, is to call into question the nature-culture distinction. That’s the view that humans are distinct from — and superior to — the rest of nature, rather than, as Outka put it, “part of the Earth that learned to talk.” Thinking of humans as an inseparable part of nature would reveal the folly — or at least the hypocrisy — of driving a gas-guzzling vehicle to a national park to view its pristine mountains and forests.
It’s the bent of mind that allows such duality that Outka explored in “Slavery and the Anthropocene,” Anthropocene being the term for the notion that the impact of human activity on the Earth is so great that it has triggered a new geological epoch, distinct from the Holocene.
Outka wrote that slavery did not trigger the Anthropocene, but it “naturalized the absolute dominance of those considered fully human over whatever they considered natural, a hierarchy that has made racial and environmental politics inseparable.”
It’s useful to ponder today, he wrote, because “the history of slavery and white supremacy provide(s) some vitally important contexts for how we think about our modernity. … (A)uthority without responsibility is at the core of our contemporary environmental crises because of the history it shares with white supremacy.”
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Editor’s note: Tribal Nations is capitalized, per source preference.
Contact: Jen Humphrey, Life Span Institute, 785-864-6621, [email protected], @kulifespan
New podcast with ties to KU research, created by and for Native Americans, provides a platform for discussions on disability and mental health
LAWRENCE — Miranda Carman could not obtain a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder for her son until he was past his fourth birthday. After years of waiting, she hoped her son’s diagnosis would finally open the door to intervention services.
But Carman, a Muscogee Creek Nation citizen and licensed clinical social worker, soon learned that there was only a single applied behavioral services provider available in her area of Oklahoma, and her insurance would not cover her son’s treatment. To access care, Carman left her job to work for the U.S. Indian Health Service, which offered insurance that would cover her son’s therapy.
It’s sharing stories such as this one that created the foundation of the “Black Feathers,” a new podcast with ties to University of Kansas research that provides a platform for discussions on disability within Tribal Nations.
Hosted by mental health experts Crystal Hernandez, who has a doctorate in psychology, and Shauna Humphreys, a licensed professional counselor, “Black Feathers” is a product of the State of the States in Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Ongoing Longitudinal Data Project of National Significance and produced with support from the Kansas University Center on Developmental Disabilities (KUCDD), a part of the KU Life Span Institute. Episodes focus on Native American experiences with intellectual disabilities, learning disabilities, mental health, anxiety disorders and health care access, among other topics.
It is the only podcast by and for Native Americans focused on intellectual and developmental disabilities, Hernandez said.
“A lot of times, we are stripped of our voices, and services and decisions are made without us,” Hernandez said. “It’s really important that we’re heard or seen for who we are and that things are not built around us, for us — but are built with us and through us.”
Hernandez is a Cherokee Nation citizen, a Latina and a mother of an autistic son. She is the executive director of the Oklahoma Forensic Center and is a board member of the Autism Foundation of Oklahoma.
Hernandez brought Humphreys on board. Humphreys is a Chahta (Choctaw) Nation citizen, a licensed professional counselor and an advocate for mental health care in Tribal Nations. She is the behavioral health director for the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She also brings her experiences as a mother of five children to the podcast.
Hernandez said there are many missed opportunities for more inclusive and more available services for developmental disabilities in Native American communities.
“We have to do better as a people and as a system,” she said.
Seeking data
“Black Feathers” grew out of a need to collect information about tribal communities across the U.S. in a way that was also culturally sensitive. Data is vital to show policymakers and others who may allocate resources what services are needed and how supports need to be structured in a way to be culturally rooted and appropriate, Hernandez said.
Shea Tanis, associate research professor, leads the State of the States in Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities at KUCDD. In 2018, an advisory group to the project requested that researchers partner with tribal communities to understand the journey of Indigenous people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families, Tanis said.
“These are not communities that generally get captured in our data,” she said. “So, the genesis came from our group wanting to investigate more.”
Tanis noted that there is an extraordinary lack of information about intellectual disabilities among tribal community citizens. Often, they have been left out of research studies, leading to gaps in knowledge about prevalence and support needs both for the individual and the family.
For example, only one-quarter of autism intervention studies provide data on the race and ethnicity of participants, according to a study published in Autism in January 2022 that looked at data from more 1,013 studies from 1990-2017. For those studies in which race was identified, the study found white participants made up 64.8% of the total portion studied. This was distantly followed by Hispanic/Latino participants at 9.4%, Black participants at 7.7% and Asian participants at 6.4%. There was only a single Native American participant identified across all studies surveyed.
As plans for the research through the State of the States in Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities project were under way, the COVID-19 pandemic prompted the group to think differently about how they could partner with Tribal Nations.
“What we did instead is started having a pivot conversation about alternatives,” Hernandez said. “And so, from that, I said, ‘Well, what about a podcast?’”
To gather data, the podcast has a two-prong approach. First, Hernandez and Humphreys said the podcast serves as a platform for people from any federally recognized Tribal Nation and from non-federally recognized tribes to speak about their experiences, to feel less alone and be empowered to share their voice; it reaches people where they are.
Second, Tanis said, a form on the “Black Feathers” website offers a space for tribal citizens to contribute about their experiences related to disabilities.
“It will help us build critical mass to drive innovation toward culturally rooted services and supports through data,” Tanis said.
Storytelling focus
Hernandez said that she and Tanis have had many conversations about meaningful ways to reach in, align and create stories out of data and out of stories themselves. Personal stories, they agreed, would be central to the work.
“In the Native culture, storytelling is huge,” Humphreys said. “And a podcast is maybe a modern way of storytelling.”
The hosts said they seek to provide a space for honest, authentic conversations to create psychological safety in the podcast room, so that people can be who they are openly.
As a guest of the third episode of the podcast, Carman spoke about how her son, like many children with autism, loved the water. Also typical of autistic children, he loved to wander.
“It was the scariest thing as a parent,” Carman said.
Carman’s story illustrated the daily stresses of parenting an autistic child in a way that raw numbers don’t always reveal.
Hernandez said that swimming and water safety is “one of the thousands of things” on her mind as a parent of an autistic child as well.
“I mean, the magnitude of that stress, and that anxiety, is hard to describe,” Hernandez said. “It’s just a level of worry that unless you’ve experienced it, you’ll never understand it. And I think having these personally touched individuals share their stories, it really validates it for a lot of people listening.”
Humphreys hopes the podcast helps lead to better services for people who need them. “And not just our family members, but our whole tribe, our communities, the state, the United States. Let’s just keep it going. Let’s hope it has a ripple effect.”
Hernandez said, “And it’s OK to be who you are and how you are. We deserve that space. And we deserve to feel well and whole.”
The fifth episode of “Black Feathers” will be released Feb. 20 through a wide variety of podcast apps. Listeners also can register to participate in a live webinar version of the podcast that will be held March 21.
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