A finance-industry professional who blew the whistle on the Royal Bank of Scotland for securities violations in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis has sued the federal government over its allegedly “blanket, generic denials” of documents related to his application for a monetary award.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in Manhattan federal court, claimed that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice had improperly withheld hundreds of pages of documents concerning the treatment of original information Hong provided, which he said led to more than $10 billion in settlements with federal agencies.