I'll tell you a quick story on this.
It's been known since the early 1980s that you need a reverse burden of proof. At the first attempt to do this in the U.S., of the first 2,000 whistle-blowers who went through this system, four prevailed, so the chances were one in 500. Those were not good chances. The next attempt at writing the law introduced this idea of a reverse burden of proof. That caused a big improvement. It's still not a slam dunk for the whistle-blower. Even with the best lawyers, to date only about 30% succeed.
Our law was written without reverse onus. More than 20 years later, the Senate tried to put in a reverse burden of proof. They introduced 16 amendments based on our testimony—all stuff that will look very familiar to you today, including reverse onus. It was rejected.
We have been in the dark ages ever since the bill was written. The bill reads like an insult to whistle-blowers. It reads like a message that says, “We are going to screw you over, and here are all the ways we're going to do it.”