Welcome back to our weekly roundup of regulatory and compliance news. Got tips or suggestions? Reach me at [email protected] or at 202-828-0315. DM me at @cryanbarber.

Meet the potential $600 million whistleblower who dropped a dime on Caterpillar. His name is Daniel Schlicksup, a 55-year-old former accountant at the world's largest manufacturer of construction equipment. Schlicksup's tips, according to Bloomberg, led prosecutors to recently raid the “mom-and-apple-pie” company. If the IRS collects the taxes it claims it is owed, Schlicksup might just become the best-paid whistleblower of all time.

The U.S. Supreme Court hasn't shown any appetite in taking up a dispute over the lawfulness of administrative law judges at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This week, the high court rejected an appeal by Lynn Tilton, the Patriarch Partners founder once known as the “Diva of Distressed,” who's challenged the constitutionality of the SEC's in-house judges. But the door isn't closed: She could have another chance to raise her argument if the SEC ultimately finds that she misled investors, Bloomberg reports. The D.C. Circuit, sitting as a full court, last week spent more than an hour debating the constitutionality of those judges, as The National Law Journal's Cogan Schneier reported here.

Levandowski's out at Uber. Once a big hire in Uber's self-driving car push, Anthony Levandowski is out of a job, felled apparently by his refusal to hand over evidence and provide testimony in a trade secrets case pitting the ride-hailing startup against Google. Uber has denied using trade secrets stolen from Google to develop autonomous cars, The New York Times reports. The Recorder's Ben Hancock has more here. Who's in at Uber? The company's still searching for a general counsel, to fill the slot Salle Yoo held until her promotion to chief legal officer. Here are five questions any would-be candidate might want to ask, from The Recorder's David Ruiz.

Accused of underpaying female workers, Google says complying with the U.S. Labor Department's demand for employee salary data would be cost-prohibitive, the Guardian reports. Google testified in a recent court hearing that the process of compiling such data would require up to 500 hours of work and cost $100,000. The Labor Department was having none of it. An attorney for the agency scoffed at Google's argument, noting that the tech giant—with nearly $28 billion in annual income—is among the most profitable U.S. companies. Here's an op-ed over at The Recorder: “Claiming to Close the Gender Pay Gap, Google Opens Door to Potential Liability.”

The EPA wants you to quit. The agency, according to Reuters, is offering buyouts as the Trump administration proposes cutting the agency's budget and workforce to reduce regulation. The EPA faces the most bloodletting of any federal agency under President Donald Trump's 2018 budget proposal, which calls for a 31 percent budget reduction and the elimination of more than 3,200 of the agency's roughly 15,000 employees.

Major U.S. companies don't see eye to eye on Trump's plan to abandon the Paris climate accords, The Washington Post reports. Along with 30 states, several companies said they would press forward with climate policies and pursue lower greenhouse gas emissions. The calls by large companies—including Apple and Morgan Stanley—for the United States to stay in the Paris accords offered a counterpoint to Trump's renunciation of the accord, which he framed as a defense of the U.S. economy. Politico has more here on the corporate response to Trump's move.

A New York judge demands accountability from the feds. A federal judge this week sentenced the 43-year-old son of the former prime minister of Gabon to two years in prison for paying bribes and serving as a “fixer” to help a financial firm score lucrative mining deals. But it wasn't the sentence that was noteworthy. Bloomberg reports that an exasperated U.S. District Senior Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the Eastern District of New York questioned prosecutors over why the firm, Och-Ziff Capital Management Group LLC, got a deferred prosecution deal. “It's time for people who are involved in this kind of behavior to be held accountable, not just one person, but everybody,” Garaufis said.

There's a new enforcer in town at the SEC, and his name is Steven Peikin. A partner at SEC Chairman Jay Clayton's former firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, Peikin will serve as co-director of enforcement with Stephanie Avakian, the SEC's acting enforcement director. It's an arrangement that could ease potential conflict issues arising from his past work for Goldman Sachs and other Sullivan & Cromwell clients, The Wall Street Journal reports. Sullivan & Cromwell's Brent McIntosh, up for general counsel to the Treasury Department, goes for a confirmation vote next week in Congress.