Bills would allow bigger payouts to Wall Street whistleblowers

The Wall Street rat is going to get more fat.

Two Washington lawmakers on Thursday introduced bills to lift the cap on how much whistleblowers can get from successful federal securities fraud suits — essentially making it easier to strike a small fortune from ratting on crooked bankers or other perpetrators of financial crimes.

The Whistleblower Augmented Reward and Non-Retaliation (WARN) Act, introduced by Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), would allow someone who knows about securities fraud to get as much as 30 percent of a financial settlement.

Previously, older laws enacted after the savings and loans scandal in the 1980s capped awards at $1.6 million.

But that’s paltry compared with more recent awards for people who blew the whistle under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform law.

In 2014, a single anonymous source took home $30 million for helping the Securities and Exchange Commission with a “difficult to detect” fraud, the agency said.