Export-control enforcement has become one of the central national-security challenges of the AI era. Congress is now moving toward a practical tool that has worked in other enforcement regimes: rewarding insiders who come forward with high-quality information.
The Stop Stealing our Chips Act, recently passed by the Senate and now pending in the House, would amend the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 to create a whistleblower incentive and protection program at the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security. If passed, the law will allow individuals who voluntarily provide original information about export-control violations that leads to qualifying BIS enforcement actions and collected penalties to receive 10 to 30 percent of those penalties. The bill also would provide confidentiality protections and anti-retaliation rights, including for certain foreign whistleblowers whose information may be essential to detecting overseas diversion schemes.
The need for this reform is plain. Export-control violations often occur through opaque supply chains, front companies, freight forwarders, third-country intermediaries, false end-user certifications, and post-sale diversion. BIS investigators cannot see every transaction in real time. Companies may not know where controlled chips, equipment, or software ultimately land. But insiders often do: compliance personnel, logistics employees, distributors, resellers, engineers, and employees of overseas intermediaries may have the records that show how restricted U.S. technology is being diverted.
This is also why the bill fills an important gap in existing whistleblower law. Congress has already expanded FinCEN’s whistleblower program to cover violations of the Bank Secrecy Act, IEEPA, the Trading With the Enemy Act, and the Kingpin Act. That expansion matters for sanctions and other national-security financial crimes. But Commerce Department export-control violations under ECRA and the Export Administration Regulations do not fit cleanly within FinCEN’s program. Before ECRA, some export cases were brought under IEEPA. Today, however, an export-control case charged or enforced under ECRA may leave whistleblowers without a dedicated, mandatory reward program—even when their information exposes conduct that threatens U.S. national security. The Stop Stealing our Chips Act would close that hole.
Critics of whistleblower reward programs typically raise several objections. They worry that awards can encourage false or exaggerated tips, that employees may bypass internal compliance programs, that exporters will face higher compliance burdens, and that BIS may need more resources to triage submissions. Those concerns deserve careful implementation, not rejection of a known and successful model. The bill contains guardrails: original-information requirements, confidentiality rules, exclusions for certain ineligible actors, and anti-retaliation protections aimed at bona fide whistleblowers. And the SEC whistleblower program shows that well-designed incentives can generate high-value information while strengthening—not weakening—compliance expectations.
Whistleblower Partners supports this reform because export-control enforcement depends on information. Laws restricting the transfer of sensitive technology are only as strong as the government’s ability to detect violations. In the AI-chip context, the stakes are not merely commercial; they include military modernization, surveillance, human-rights abuses, and strategic competition with adversarial states. A BIS whistleblower program would give insiders a secure, protected, and meaningful path to report violations before controlled technology disappears into illicit networks.
Effective export controls require more than rules on paper. They require people with evidence to come forward—and a legal framework that protects and rewards them when they do.
