PwC Rightly Fired Former Auditor, Judge Rules (2)

PwC LLP was justified in firing a former auditor and didn’t retaliate against him for submitting a whistleblower complaint to the SEC alleging the firm was too cozy with its client, a San Francisco federal judge ruled Monday.

Magistrate Judge Alex Tse of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in an opinion said Mauro Botta, a former senior manager at PwC, didn’t qualify for whistleblower protections under the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act after he raised questions about his former firm’s independence from its clients to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Tse found that Botta didn’t prove that ...