A former Deutsche Bank executive who went public with allegations that the lender’s asset-management arm overstated its environmental, social, and governance (ESG) credentials has been denied a U.S. whistleblower award because regulators say they first learned of her claims through the press, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Desiree Fixler, who served as sustainability chief at Deutsche Bank’s DWS Group from 2020 to 2021, helped build the case that led the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to fine the asset manager $19 million in 2023, according to the Journal. Whistleblowers in such cases can potentially collect between 10 percent and 30 percent of the penalties imposed by the agency but Fixler learned last month that her award was zero.

“The SEC broke its own rules,” Fixler told the newspaper. “I worked with them for two years, and then they denied me the award for the case I built.” The newspaper said she is appealing the rejection in federal court on Monday.

According to the WSJ, Fixler became the kind of Wall Street insider regulators have sought to cultivate through the SEC’s whistleblower program, which since its launch in 2011 has paid out more than $2 billion to tipsters, with at least one whistleblower earning over $200 million. Last year, the agency disbursed $60 million in awards, the lowest annual total since 2019.

Fixler’s allegations against DWS were first reported in detail by the Journal in an August 2021 article after she told the news outlet that DWS had misled investors by representing that every investment team used ESG factors in making decisions. As one example, she said she had identified a case in which Wirecard AG, the German payments company that collapsed in a fraud scandal, ended up in an actively managed ESG fund, which was supposed to favor companies with strong governance.

Fixler filed a complaint with the SEC three days after its 2021 article appeared and went on to spend more than 100 hours walking commission staff through Deutsche Bank’s ESG program and how investment firms screen for ESG risks in public companies, according to the report. 

In its order denying her award request, the SEC acknowledged it had opened its investigation based on Fixler’s statements to the Journal but said her cooperation did not qualify as “voluntary” because she had not approached the regulator first, the paper reported. 

“Where a claimant provides information to a media outlet, and commission staff learn of the allegations from the media outlet, a claimant has not provided the commission with information,” the SEC wrote, according to the Journal.

Fixler and her attorney, Stephen Kohn, told the WSJ that the agency’s definition of “voluntary” defies the plain-English meaning of the word and effectively blocks whistleblowers from using the press as a channel to expose wrongdoing. 

Fixler said SEC investigators had repeatedly described her cooperation as voluntary in correspondence, including a November 2021 email in which an SEC official instructed her to identify herself as “the whistleblower who sent” a tip to the agency. The agency’s order dismissed those communications as “casual comments” that did not bind the commission to treat her as a whistleblower.