Minnesota Defines Whistleblower "Good Faith" by What It Is Not — and in Six Years of Published Decisions Only One Court Construed the Definition

The definition is two sentences sitting in two different sections

Minn. Stat. § 181.931, subd. 4, is one sentence and answers nothing by itself:

“Good faith” means conduct that does not violate section 181.932, subdivision 3.

Minn. Stat. § 181.932, subd. 3, is one sentence and supplies the content:

This section does not permit an employee to make statements or disclosures knowing that they are false or that they are in reckless disregard of the truth.

Read together, the Act does not tell you what good faith is. It tells you what defeats it, and it names two states of mind: knowing falsity, and reckless disregard of the truth. Nothing else in §§ 181.931 to 181.935 adds to that list. The companion guide on what counts as a report walks the definition and the 2013 act that produced it. This page is about what Minnesota courts have done with the definition since — which turns out to be very little, and the little they have done is worth knowing precisely.

The carve-out is not the new part

Employers sometimes describe the 2013 amendment as the year the Legislature added a bad-faith exclusion to the Act. It did not. The exclusion has been in the statute since the Act was enacted.

Laws 1987, ch. 76, § 2, created § 181.932, and its subdivision 3 read, in the act’s own new-language markup, exactly as it reads today: “This section does not permit an employee to make statements or disclosures knowing that they are false or that they are in reckless disregard of the truth.” The Minnesota Supreme Court said the same thing in Friedlander v. Edwards Lifesciences, LLC, 900 N.W.2d 162 (Minn. 2017). At 165:

Likewise, the Act has always provided that a false or reckless report is not protected.

What Laws 2013, ch. 83, § 1, did was make that pre-existing carve-out the entire content of “good faith.” The court spelled out the consequence at 166 (citation omitted):

Before the 2013 amendment, Obst’s interpretation of the Act already excluded knowingly false or reckless reports from the scope of the Act’s protections. The 2013 amendment’s definition of “good faith” reasserts this exclusion. Accordingly, for the 2013 amendment’s definition of “good faith” to have effect and to change the law, it must be interpreted to have changed the Obst definition of “good faith.”

That is the mechanism of the holding, and it runs the opposite direction from the way employers usually describe it. The definition changed the law because the falsity exclusion was already there. If the amendment had added nothing but the exclusion, it would have added nothing at all.

What it displaced, and the jury instruction that proves how much

Until 2013 the operative test came from Obst v. Microtron, Inc., 614 N.W.2d 196 (Minn. 2000). At 202:

In order to determine whether a report of a violation or suspected violation of law is made in good faith, we must look not only at the content of the report, but also at the reporter’s purpose in making the report. The central question is whether the reports were made for the purpose of blowing the whistle, i.e., to expose an illegality.

The clearest picture of what that meant in an actual courtroom is in Kidwell v. Sybaritic, Inc., 784 N.W.2d 220 (Minn. 2010) (plurality opinion), which quotes the instruction a Hennepin County jury was given. At 225:

An employee does not engage in protected activity unless he made a report in good faith. To determine whether a report was made in good faith, you must look not only at the content of the report, but also at Mr. Kidwell’s job and purpose in making the report at the time the report was made, not after subsequent events have transpired.

Set that paragraph beside § 181.931, subd. 4, and the distance is the size of the 2013 amendment. Friedlander, 900 N.W.2d at 166 (citations omitted):

Our prior interpretation of “good faith” in Obst gives the phrase a meaning different from the definition provided in the 2013 amendment. Specifically, the definition in Obst requires us to examine the reporter’s purpose as well as the content of the report. The statutory definition, however, directs us to conduct a different inquiry, looking only to the content of the report.

The Minnesota Supreme Court’s answer to the question the federal district court had sent up was a single sentence. Friedlander, 900 N.W.2d at 163:

Because we conclude that the 2013 amendment abrogates our prior interpretation of “good faith,” we answer the certified question in the affirmative.

One published decision construed the definition. Here is the search.

Negatives on this site are reports of searches, so here is the search, in full, with the numbers that make it falsifiable.

Every published Minnesota Supreme Court and Minnesota Court of Appeals decision in the North Western Reporter, Second Series, volumes 825 through 932 was retrieved from the Caselaw Access Project and searched — 1,673 decisions, filed between May 29, 2013 and September 4, 2019 — every one of them after Laws 2013, ch. 83, was signed on May 24, 2013. The strings searched, and the decisions that contain them:

Volume 932 is the end of the Caselaw Access Project’s North Western Reporter run, so the search reaches published decisions through September 4, 2019 and no further. For the years after that, two Minnesota Supreme Court whistleblower decisions were retrieved from the State Law Library’s slip-opinion archive and read in full: Hanson v. Department of Natural Resources, No. A20-0747 (Minn. Apr. 6, 2022), and Wredberg v. Canvas Health, Inc., No. A24-1897 (Minn. Aug. 12, 2026). Neither construes the definition. The archive’s own index pages could not be retrieved, so nothing on this page is a claim about the whole of Minnesota’s post-2019 appellate output — only about the decisions named.

Neither criminal decision involves the Whistleblower Act. In both, the phrase appears in the search-warrant context of Franks v. Delaware — part of the showing a defendant must make to invalidate a warrant on the ground that the supporting affidavit was false. State v. Dexter, 929 N.W.2d 455, 465 (Minn. Ct. App. 2019); State v. Eichers, 840 N.W.2d 210, 222 (Minn. Ct. App. 2013). They are listed because the count is the point, and a count that omitted them would not be checkable.

What each of the whistleblower decisions actually did with good faith

Friedlander decided the question and nothing else. It reached the Minnesota Supreme Court as a question the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota had sent up, and it went back the same way. A footnote records what the court did not reach: the parties “dispute whether Friedlander’s termination was because of Friedlander’s statements to his superiors about the alleged misconduct, or because Friedlander violated company policy in submitting expense reimbursement requests. This dispute is not relevant to the issue currently before our court.” Friedlander, 900 N.W.2d at 164 n.1. No Minnesota court has applied the definition to a contested record and said whether a particular report cleared it.

Moore quoted the requirement and construed a different word. Moore v. City of New Brighton, 932 N.W.2d 317 (Minn. Ct. App. 2019), sets out clause (1) at 323, including its “in good faith” requirement, and then spends the opinion on the definition of “penalize” in § 181.931, subd. 5 — the subject of what “penalize” reaches. Good faith was not the contested element.

Hanson had the argument and lost it before the supreme court got there. The Department of Natural Resources moved for summary judgment arguing, among other things, that “her reporting was not in good faith.” Hanson, slip op. at 13. By the time the case reached the supreme court the argument was gone: “Because the DNR does not argue that Hanson’s reporting was not protected conduct, we assume that her reporting is statutorily protected.” Id. at 20. Hanson lost her case — but on causation and pretext, which is treated in causation, knowledge, and timing, not on good faith.

Wredberg was a refusal case, and clause (3) has no good-faith requirement. Wredberg construed § 181.932, subd. 1(3), which asks whether the employee had “an objective basis in fact to believe” the ordered action was unlawful. That standard, and what the supreme court expressly declined to decide about it, are in refusing an illegal order.

Two questions the definition leaves open

Who has to establish it. Clause (1) is phrased so that good faith travels with the employee’s report — an employer may not retaliate because the employee “in good faith, reports” a violation. Subdivision 3 is phrased as a limit on the statute itself — “This section does not permit an employee to make statements or disclosures” that are knowingly false or reckless. One reads like an element of the claim; the other reads like a boundary on the section. No decision retrieved for this page allocates the burden of proof on the point under the 2013 definition, and this page does not assign it.

What “reckless disregard of the truth” requires. The phrase is not defined in § 181.931, and no Minnesota whistleblower decision retrieved for this page construes it as it is used in § 181.932, subd. 3. An employee who reports something and turns out to be wrong about the facts is not, by that fact, reckless — Hedglin v. City of Willmar, 582 N.W.2d 897, 902 (Minn. 1998), held “it is irrelevant whether there were any actual violations” — but the line between being wrong and being reckless about being wrong has no Minnesota whistleblower decision behind it.

The four clauses that use the phrase, and the two that do not

The phrase “in good faith” appears four times in § 181.932, all of them in subdivision 1, and it does different work in different clauses:

• Clause (1), the report clause: the employee “in good faith, reports a violation, suspected violation, or planned violation” of law.
• Clause (4), health care quality: the employee “in good faith, reports a situation in which the quality of health care services” violates a standard — and the clause adds its own requirement that the situation “potentially places the public at risk of harm.”
• Clause (5), a public employee communicating the findings of a scientific or technical study “that the employee, in good faith, believes to be truthful and accurate.”
• Clause (6), a state employee communicating information “that the employee, in good faith, believes to be truthful and accurate” about state programs, services, or financing.

Clauses (5) and (6) pair the defined term with an express belief requirement — the employee must, in good faith, believe the communication truthful and accurate. Clauses (1) and (4) do not. Because § 181.931, subd. 1, provides that the section’s defined terms “have the meanings given them” throughout §§ 181.931 to 181.935, the same one-sentence definition governs all four. How a definition written entirely in terms of falsity operates inside a clause that separately requires a belief in truth and accuracy is a question no retrieved decision answers.

Clause (2) — an employee requested by a public body or office to participate in an investigation — contains no state-of-mind requirement at all. Clause (3) uses a different standard entirely: an “objective basis in fact to believe” the ordered action violates the law. And the phrase appears nowhere in § 181.933, § 181.934, or § 181.935.

What survives from before the definition existed

Three pre-2013 holdings get cited as good-faith law. They are not all in the same position now.

Being wrong about the facts is not disqualifying. Hedglin, 582 N.W.2d at 902: “There may be fact questions as to whether any of these statutes were actually violated, but for purposes of the whistleblower statute, it is irrelevant whether there were any actual violations; the only requirement is that the reports of state law violations were made in good faith.” That holding never depended on the reporter’s purpose, and the 2013 definition does not touch it.

Being wrong about the law is disqualifying — but that holding does not live in the good-faith element. Kratzer v. Welsh Companies, LLC, 771 N.W.2d 14, 22 (Minn. 2009): “Although there need not be an actual violation, the law alleged to have been violated must exist.” The court reached that by construing what it means to report “a violation or suspected violation,” and it rejected the contrary argument “on at least three occasions.” Kratzer, 771 N.W.2d at 21–22. A reader who files that rule under “good faith” will misread both elements; the sibling guide on what counts as a report carries it.

The “neutral party” description was never Obst’s own, and it was never part of the purpose test. At 614 N.W.2d 200 — two pages before the purpose analysis — Obst wrote that “we have suggested” the Act “protects the conduct of a neutral party ‘who “blows the whistle” for the protection of the general public or, at the least, some third person or persons in addition to the whistleblower,’“ quoting Williams v. St. Paul Ramsey Medical Center, Inc., 551 N.W.2d 483, 484 n.1 (Minn. 1996). It appears in the court’s general description of the statute, alongside the rule that the reported conduct must implicate a violation of law — not in the good-faith purpose inquiry at 202. The Minnesota Supreme Court has already put the passage in its place once: Hedglin, 582 N.W.2d at 903, called it “dictum,” agreed with it only as “cautionary language,” and held that applying it did not defeat the whistleblower claims before the court. What remains of the description after the 2013 amendment is a further question no decision retrieved for this page reaches, and this page does not reach it either.

And the jury-instruction question was raised, granted, and never answered. Sybaritic’s conditional cross-review in Kidwell asked the supreme court to decide “whether the good faith jury instruction given by the district court was erroneous,” and the court granted review on it. Kidwell, 784 N.W.2d at 226. It then disposed of the case on a different ground: “This decision makes it unnecessary for us to reach the other issues raised in this appeal.” Id. at 231. No decision in the searched corpus, and neither of the two post-2019 supreme court decisions retrieved for this page, says what a good-faith instruction should say — and the instruction Kidwell reproduced is one the Legislature has since written out of the statute.

What this page does not do

It reports what the retrieved decisions hold about a defined term. It does not evaluate a report, a motive, or a termination, and it does not tell you which side of “reckless disregard of the truth” any particular statement falls on — that line has no Minnesota whistleblower decision drawn along it.

Currency

Statutory text is quoted from the 2025 Minnesota Statutes as posted by the Revisor. The History line for § 181.931 reads 1987 c 76 s 1; 2013 c 83 s 1-3; 2025 c 39 art 2 s 54-56, and for § 181.932 1987 c 76 s 2; 1988 c 659 s 2; 1997 c 237 s 16; 1999 c 227 s 14; 2007 c 135 art 3 s 16; 2013 c 83 s 4; 2023 c 53 art 11 s 26; 2025 c 39 art 2 s 57. The Revisor’s Table 2 was queried for each section separately, at both /statutes/2025/table2 and /statutes/2026/table2, and every returned row was read on its Session column: the most recent action on either section is the 2025 regular session, and neither section has a 2026 row. Sections 181.933, 181.934, and 181.935 were checked the same way; § 181.935’s History line ends at 2007 c 135 art 3 s 17. The 2025 act amended clause (6) of § 181.932, subd. 1, and added three definitions to § 181.931; it did not touch subdivision 4 or § 181.932, subdivision 3.

Related: what counts as a report, the Whistleblower Act protects the report, the map of Minnesota whistleblower claims, and was my firing illegal.