Whistleblower laws include a variety of specific regulations that provide different rights to whistleblowers. Most of the major whistleblower laws including whistleblower award laws include anti-retaliation provisions.
It is important to know that anti-retaliation provisions generally provide a basis for individuals to sue along with strong rights to damages, but they do not protect from retaliation occurring in the first place. They do provide for extensive rights to collect under such provisions including often two times damages for lost pay, reinstatement damages and attorneys fees.
All of the major whistleblower award laws now have anti-retaliation provisions. This is a relatively new development, because the IRS whistleblower law has only recently instituted an anti-retaliation provision for people who report tax fraud. Until recently, that was not the case; it was relatively unusual for a whistleblower to experience any difficulty for reporting tax fraud directly to the IRS because the IRS tends to treat reports under its IRS whistleblower program as extremely confidential.