by Benjamin R. Barron, Gregory D. Bernstein, and Shaun A. Hoting
The Department of Justice (DOJ) is shrinking—but its reach is growing.
Over the past year, DOJ has lost thousands of employees throughout the country, across major enforcement units such as the Fraud Section, Health Care Fraud Unit, and Public Integrity Section. It has moved to dismantle longstanding components such as the Consumer Protection Branch and Tax Division, which handled some of its most complex matters. Locally, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California has experienced a truly unprecedented wave of departures. Yet from another angle, DOJ looks less like it’s contracting than pivoting.
At an equally unprecedented clip, DOJ has announced new initiatives, new working groups, and new data-fusion centers. The paradox is striking: fewer hands, more white-collar tools. Behind that paradox is a quiet but deliberate redesign of how the Department enforces corporate crime. Rather than expanding its ranks, DOJ has extended its reach—using companies, whistleblowers, and data-mining algorithms to bring enforcement targets to its doorstep.
Through a combination of revised self-disclosure policies, whistleblower award programs, and data-analytics initiatives, DOJ has created what baseball fans would easily recognize as a classic rundown—a squeeze from all sides that leaves companies scrambling for safety. It is putting pressure on companies from all sides to investigate fast, report first, and cooperate completely.
The Self-Disclosure Arm While DOJ first stood up a voluntary self-disclosure policy in 2018, it recently announced a groundbreaking change to the program. The 2025 update, rolled out last spring, brought a long-overdue change: clarity. For the first time ever, the new policy makes clear that when a company’s self-disclosure of internal misconduct meets all criteria—prompt reporting, full cooperation, and remediation—DOJ will issue a declination absent aggravating factors. Earlier versions left discretion in a gray zone.
As Matthew Galeotti, head of DOJ’s Criminal Division, explained: “The benefits to companies that voluntarily self-report, cooperate, and remediate have never been clearer and more certain: those companies will receive a declination, not just a presumption.”
This change sounds technical, but in practice it transforms corporate decision-making. The new standard doesn’t just reward honesty—it rewards speed.
To qualify, a company must self-report before any “imminent threat” of a government investigation—and that window can close in a matter of weeks. The clock starts the moment credible evidence of potential misconduct surfaces. Before a whistleblower tip is filed, an administrative audit spots a red flag or an algorithm connects the dots.
Acting quickly can mean the difference between a clean declination and a protracted government investigation or, worse yet, criminal charges. The result is a race to investigate misconduct and, where appropriate, get the facts to the Department’s door.
The Whistleblower Arm Then comes another front in the squeeze. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Training Commission (CFTC) have long administered whistleblower programs, enabling insiders to secure lucrative cash awards for reporting corporate misconduct resulting in a successful enforcement action. The availability of financial rewards modeled on qui tam principles spurs insiders to bring information straight to the government. And the larger the reported fraud, the larger the potential award, with some awards reaching into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Yet even as those agencies issued press releases touting major enforcement actions resulting from insider tips, DOJ never followed suit with its own whistleblower program.
Until now.
While DOJ first announced a whistleblower awards pilot program in August 2024, the version unveiled in May 2025 is much more expansive. It broadens eligible subject matter, refines procedures, and clarifies how companies can remain eligible for declination in self-reporting misconduct even after a whistleblower reports the same conduct.
DOJ’s new program also fills the gaps left by the SEC and CFTC regimes—covering areas such as health care fraud, government contracting, and antitrust. And in rolling out the new program, DOJ created a tipline, allowing corporate insiders to report crime, upload supporting evidence, and communicate directly with federal investigators.
From DOJ’s perspective, whistleblowers are a force multiplier. They deliver evidence directly to prosecutors at a time when the Department has far less bandwidth to launch sprawling investigations from scratch. As Galeotti put it in recent public remarks, DOJ “expanded the Corporate Whistleblower Awards Pilot Program because these policies work. They incentivize companies and individuals to report crime to let us go after bad actors.” The goal: “to reflect our focus on the worst actors and most egregious crimes.”
For companies, it’s not so simple. A whistleblower who skips internal channels can unleash multiple investigations at once, risk exposing privileged material, and lock in a version of events before the company has a chance to check the facts. Worse still for companies, whistleblowers can submit evidence anonymously. Across the country, businesses may have DOJ whistleblowers in their ranks—without ever knowing it.
The message to corporate America is unmistakable: if you don’t take swift action to investigate and fix compliance problems, someone else might beat you to the punch.
The Data Arm The third piece of the squeeze relies on technology rather than people. In June 2025, DOJ and the Department of Health and Human Services announced the creation of a Health Care Fraud Data Fusion Center, designed to “leverage cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and advanced analytics to identify emerging health care fraud schemes.”
DOJ has also partnered with the Department of Homeland Security on a cross-agency Trade Fraud Task Force, using data to target tariff and customs evasion, and recently unveiled a Civil Rights Fraud Initiative to explore algorithmic detection of campus practices that run afoul of the administration’s policies.
As longtime former federal prosecutors, we know the power that new technology offers in areas such as health care or securities enforcement. Using high-powered technologies, prosecutors can tap billing data, banking data, trading data, or any number of other readily accessible troves to identify high-value targets at a speed never before possible. The goal, again from Galeotti, is to “break down information silos, using coordinated data analysis to enable our investigative teams to quickly identify and dismantle emerging fraud schemes,” all as part of “a new era of aggressive prosecution and data-driven prevention.”
In July 2025, DOJ repeatedly touted those tools in announcing its largest-ever annual health care fraud takedown. With 324 defendants charged in more than $14 billion of alleged fraud, the takedown more than doubled the previous record.
Even if no human tips off DOJ, a company’s paper trail lives forever. And DOJ, like businesses throughout the country, is harnessing AI technologies to overhaul its detection capabilities.
Looking Ahead In the modern DOJ, prosecutors no longer need to find every case. They’ve built a system that outsources targeting—one where the cases find them. For companies and counsel, that means acting early, before a whistleblower, algorithm, or prosecutor gets there first. In the era of self-reporting, speed and credibility are the currency of compliance. The companies that act fastest are the ones that stay ahead of the squeeze.
Benjamin R. Barron, Gregory D. Bernstein, and Shaun A. Hoting are white-collar defense attorneys with Keller Anderle Scolnick LLP.
Criminal Deliberationsis an occasional column about criminal litigation that offers insights into a ruling or practice.