Minnesota Has No Job-Duties Exception to the Whistleblower Act — and the Case That Says So Is the Case in Which the Employee Lost His Verdict

The question, and the answer that is easy to state

An employee whose job is to find and report problems — a compliance officer, a nurse, an internal auditor, a safety coordinator, a human-resources manager, in-house counsel — makes the report the job calls for and is then fired. Does the Minnesota Whistleblower Act reach that?

Employers have argued for a categorical rule: reporting was your job, so the report was not whistleblowing. The Minnesota Court of Appeals adopted that rule in 2008. The Minnesota Supreme Court rejected it in 2010. It then decided the case for the employer anyway, on reasoning that the Legislature undercut three years later.

What Kidwell rejected

Kidwell v. Sybaritic, Inc., 784 N.W.2d 220 (Minn. 2010), arose out of an email. Brian Kidwell was Sybaritic’s in-house general counsel. On a Sunday in April 2005, back from a business trip, he sent the management team a message titled “A Difficult Duty,” describing what he called a “pervasive culture of dishonesty” and naming specifics: a failure to investigate dishonest salespeople, someone on staff engaged in the unauthorized practice of medicine, unpaid California taxes, and — the matter he said he was obliged to raise — suspected obstruction of justice in a pending intellectual-property case in which he was attorney of record. A jury found for him. The court of appeals reversed, holding that a report made in fulfillment of an employee’s job duties is not protected conduct.

On the categorical rule, the supreme court was direct. At 226–27:

The whistleblower statute does not contain any limiting language that supports the blanket job duties exception the court of appeals crafted. We therefore reject as too broad the court of appeals’ conclusion that, as a matter of law, “an employee does not engage in protected conduct under the whistleblower act if the employee makes a report in fulfillment of the duties of his or her job.”

That reading rests on the statute’s own words, and the dissenting justices reached the same conclusion on the same ground. At 234, Justice Paul H. Anderson wrote: “Because I find no job duties exception within the language of the Minnesota Whistleblower Act and conclude that the evidence was sufficient to support the jury’s finding that Brian Kidwell acted in good faith, I would reverse the court of appeals and affirm the district court.”

What Kidwell did next, and why it matters that it is a plurality

Having rejected the categorical rule, the opinion did not stop. At 227:

Although we hold that the whistleblower statute does not contain a job duties exception, we do not go so far as to hold that an employee’s job duties are irrelevant in determining whether an employee has engaged in protected conduct.

The route it took was the “good faith” element, which in 2010 the court had defined judicially. In Obst v. Microtron, Inc., 614 N.W.2d 196, 202 (Minn. 2000), the court had held that good faith turned on the content of the report and on the reporter’s purpose, and that “[t]he central question is whether the reports were made for the purpose of blowing the whistle, i.e., to expose an illegality.” Kidwell said at 227 that “[a]n examination of the employee’s job duties could be helpful in answering this central question,” and located its whole discussion inside that element: “our discussion of Huffman arises in the context of construing the element of ‘good faith’ in our statute.” Kidwell, 784 N.W.2d at 227.

Borrowing from a Federal Circuit decision under the federal Whistleblower Protection Act, the opinion then set out the framework employers have cited ever since. At 228:

An employee cannot be said to have “blown the whistle” when the employee’s report is made because it is the employee’s job to investigate and report wrongdoing. When an employee responsible for investigating and reporting illegal behavior makes a report of such behavior, that employee will need something more than the report itself to support the conclusion that the employee is making the report as a “neutral party” who is intending to “blow the whistle.”

It gave two examples of what “something more” might look like, both of them phrased as inferences a factfinder could draw about purpose:

• A report made outside normal channels, because the employee believes the ordinary chain of command is unresponsive. Kidwell, 784 N.W.2d at 228–29.
• A report made under an employment-related obligation that is not part of the employee’s assigned duties — the example given was a general regulatory duty on all employees of an agency to report waste, fraud, abuse, and corruption. Id. at 229.

Applying that to the facts, the plurality repeated at 229–30 that “an employee’s job duties may inform the question of the employee’s purpose in making a report,” found that Kidwell was performing his function as general counsel when he sent the email, and concluded at 230 that “[t]he text of the email thus confirms that Kidwell’s purpose was not to ‘expose an illegality,’ but was to provide legal advice to his client.” It held at 231 that the district court should have granted judgment as a matter of law against him.

That analysis did not command a majority. Chief Justice Magnuson concurred in the result on entirely different ground, writing at 231–32: “I concur in the result reached in the opinion authored by Justice Gildea that Kidwell cannot recover in this case, but do so on different grounds. In my opinion, Kidwell’s breach of fiduciary duty bars his claim.” Three justices dissented. The Minnesota Supreme Court later described the decision, in terms, as a plurality opinion. Friedlander v. Edwards Lifesciences, LLC, 900 N.W.2d 162, 165 (Minn. 2017).

The ground it stood on is gone

Everything Kidwell said about job duties was said in service of one question: what was the employee’s purpose? Three years later the Legislature defined “good faith” for itself. Laws 2013, ch. 83, § 1, added Minn. Stat. § 181.931, subd. 4:

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

And § 181.932, subd. 3, is about falsity, not purpose:

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.

In Friedlander, the supreme court held that the new definition displaced the old test. It noted at 165 that the court had “reaffirmed this definition of ‘good faith’ in Kidwell v. Sybaritic, Inc., 784 N.W.2d 220, 227 (Minn. 2010) (plurality opinion)” — a citation to page 227, which is where Kidwell’s job-duties discussion sits. It then held at 166:

The statutory definition, however, directs us to conduct a different inquiry, looking only to the content of the report.

And it stated the conclusion at 166: the 2013 amendment “eliminated the judicially created requirement that a putative whistleblower act with the purpose of exposing an illegality.”

What is settled and what is not

Settled, though not by a majority opinion. There is no job-duties exception in the Minnesota Whistleblower Act. Every justice who reached the question rejected it, in two opinions that agree on nothing else: the plurality, Kidwell, 784 N.W.2d at 226–27, and the three dissenting justices on the same textual ground, id. at 234. The chief justice concurred in the result on a different ground entirely — the employee’s fiduciary duty as a lawyer — and did not reach it. Id. at 231–32. A compliance officer, a nurse, an auditor, and an in-house lawyer are all “employee[s]” within Minn. Stat. § 181.931, subd. 2, and nothing in the statutory text excludes a communication because making it was the employee’s job.

Settled. The reporter’s purpose is no longer an element of good faith. Friedlander, 900 N.W.2d at 166.

Unsettled, and the honest answer is that it is unsettled. What remains of Kidwell’s “something more” requirement. The requirement was an evidentiary gloss on an element the Legislature has replaced, and it was never a majority holding. But Friedlander was answering one narrow question and did not discuss Kidwell’s job-duties analysis beyond citing it. Three searches of the CourtListener opinion database were run for this page. Minnesota Supreme Court decisions filed since January 1, 2017 that mention both “whistleblower” and section 181.932 return four; of those, the two retrieved and read for this tranche — Friedlander itself, and Wredberg v. Canvas Health, Inc., No. A24-1897 (Minn. Aug. 12, 2026) — do not reach the job-duties question. Minnesota Supreme Court and Court of Appeals decisions filed since May 25, 2013 that mention Kidwell together with “job duties” return none. Minnesota Supreme Court and Court of Appeals decisions filed since Friedlander that cite § 181.932 together with “job duties” return none. This page does not tell you that Kidwell’s framework is dead, and it does not tell you it is alive, because no Minnesota appellate court has said.

The separate problem for lawyers

Kidwell is also the Minnesota case on whether in-house counsel can bring a whistleblower claim at all, and on that question it decided nothing. Sybaritic asked the court to hold that an in-house attorney is precluded from or limited in claiming the statute’s protection. The court disposed of the appeal on the protected-conduct question and wrote at 231: “This decision makes it unnecessary for us to reach the other issues raised in this appeal.”

What the case contains instead is a disagreement in the margins. The chief justice would have held that a lawyer who breaches a fiduciary duty to the client is barred from the claim; the dissent answered at 243 that “[n]othing in the statute or the rule, however, supports the concurrence’s bright-line rule that breaking a fiduciary duty forecloses a whistleblower claim.” Neither position is a holding of the court.

What this page does not do

It describes what the statute and the retrieved decisions say about reports made in the course of a job. It does not apply that to any particular report, any particular job description, or any particular termination, and the distance between the two is where the work is.

Currency

The statutory text quoted here is from the 2025 Minnesota Statutes as posted by the Revisor. The History line for § 181.931 ends at 2025 c 39 art 2 s 54-56 and for § 181.932 at 2025 c 39 art 2 s 57; the Revisor’s Table 2, queried per section, records no 2026 action on either.

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