The US Securities and Exchange Commission announced that Activision Blizzard has agreed to pay $35 million to settle accusations that it failed to have mechanisms in place to properly manage disclosures of employee grievances and violated whistleblower protection regulations.
The SEC stated that the corporation was aware that employee retention concerns posed “a particularly important risk in its business” between 2018 and 2021, but did not have proper measures in place to manage workplace misconduct allegations across all business units.
Jason Burt, head of the SEC’s Denver office, said in a statement: “Activision Blizzard failed to implement necessary controls to collect and review employee complaints about workplace misconduct, which left it without the means to determine whether larger issues existed that needed to be disclosed to investors.”
The popular “Call of Duty” video game creator and publisher also compelled employees between 2016 and 2021 to alert the corporation if the SEC contacted them for information, in breach of whistleblower protection standards, according to the agency’s statement.