Whistleblower

The US False Claims Act (FCA) was enacted during Abraham Lincoln’s Administration to ensure that the bills submitted to the US Department of Defense are fair and honest. The FCA has been amended many times to include bills submitted to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) and other federal agencies. The FCA also provides…

Businesses throughout Arizona and the rest of the country have been struggling to stay afloat ever since the COVID-19 pandemic reached the United States. Arizona is slowly reopening the state, including non-essential businesses. Thousands of businesses applied for and received Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans from the federal government to help prevent laying off employees.…

Employees, contractors, and anyone who is aware of healthcare fraud may be eligible to receive a percentage of any recovery the government obtains if their disclosure is useful to the government. The False Claims Act authorizes awards, generally between 10 and 30 percent, for disclosing fraud by doctors, medical practices, laboratories, pharmacies, hospitals, and any…

A whistleblower is a legal term. It refers to someone who discloses fraud, illegal conduct, or severe wrongs in accordance with a whistleblower statute. Many whistleblower claims are brought through the False Claims Act, in qui tam actions. This law, which was enacted during the administration of Abraham Lincoln, rewards people who disclose fraud involving…

This has been a bad year for corporations; not for their bottom lines, per se, but for their reputations: Facebook and Cambridge Analytica sold us out. United Airlines let people’s pets die. An autonomous Uber car hit and killed a pedestrian in Tempe. Google is embroiled in sexual harassment accusations. Sloan Kettering’s CEO made money…

People are often worried before bringing a whistleblower or a qui tam action that they might lose their job, and that’s often a deterrent for people who have information about their employer stealing from the government. Fortunately, there are protections in the law so that you don’t lose your job for doing this. The first…

If you haven’t seen the CBS show Whistleblower yet, you’re missing out. Each week, the show covers a different case of fraud committed at taxpayers’ expense, and how honest, every day people are making a difference in our country. So far, the show has looked at companies overcharging school districts for cafeteria food, doctors who…

At the end of December 2017, Kmart Corp agreed to pay out $32.3 million to the United States as part of a settlement of a lawsuit brought under the False Claims Act. The lawsuit, filed in 2008, alleged that Kmart overcharged government programs and private insurers for generic prescription drugs over a period of 12…

When the World Intellectual Property Organization published the latest draft of their new Whistleblower Protection Act earlier in 2017, it was hoped that the new guidelines would meet the best-practice standards set by the Government Accountability Project. Sadly, the draft fails these standards by a wide margin, leaving global intellectual property systems participants, like those…

Whistleblowers have a vital role to play in helping the federal government identify fraud and corruption, which costs taxpayers billions of dollars each year. At the end of last year (2016), the U.S. Department of Justice announced that about $4.7 billion had been recovered through False Claims Act cases, $2.9 billion of which came from…

News broke recently of a huge scandal in the healthcare world: Benjamin Poehling of UnitedHealth Group asserts that his former employer, and likely many other big name insurance companies, are gaming the Medicare Advantage system. Poehling contends that UnitedHealth Group was manipulating a system to incentivize patients to be diagnosed as sicker than they were.…

Wait-times in any medical situation can be more than simply frustrating; they can be life-threatening. Due the high number of veterans eligible for services in the Arizona VA system, a bonus was devised to incentivize faster appointment scheduling (14 days or under) and appearances. Although the vast majority of veterans receive services in less than…