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False Claims Act Update & Alert |
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Taxpayers
Against Fraud Education Fund | Washington, D.C. |
WWW.TAF.ORG
January 10, 2012 |
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 Actavis to Pay Over $202
Million
After losing at
trial in Texas last year, Actavis Group has agreed to settle
and pay
$202 million which will
release the company from price-gouging charges in other
states as well as Texas. Though the U.S. Department of Justice did not join Texas or
the other state cases, it will recover $108 million from the
settlement while the relator, Ven-A-Care of the Florida
Keys, will collect $15.6 million.
Notes Ven-A-Care counsel Jim Breen: "The
U.S. declined to intervene, which means the Justice
Department didn’t invest any resources in this case. Ven-A-Care and its legal team funded and pursued the
case, and took all the risks.”
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 GE Healthcare to Pay
$30 Million
GE Healthcare has agreed to pay $30 million
to settle a False Claims Act lawsuit in which a
whistleblower alleged a GE Healthcare company marketed a
cardiac diagnostic drug as one that
could be diluted and
extended to more patients than intended.
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 J&J's
FCA Risperdal Liabilities
Johnson & Johnson will reportedly pay
more than $1 billion to
settle civil charges with the U.S. and most states over
off-label marketing of the antipsychotic drug Risperdal,
with
another $400 million
reportedly earmarked for a criminal plea. Those
payments do not clear the deck for J&J,
however. The company goes to trial this week in Texas on the
same, and additional, charges, with the state seeking $1
billion. Johnson &
Johnson has already lost state judgments on the marketing of
Risperdal in
South Carolina and Louisiana
for sums totaling almost $600 million.
South
Carolina judge
Roger L. Couch noted in his
damages
decision that J&J's profits on Risperdal were 97 percent of
sales, or $28.9 billion, between 1994 and 2010. |
 Container
Shipper to Pay $32
Million
Norfolk, Virginia-based Maersk Line and its Danish
parent company have agreed to
pay $31.9 million to
settle charges they submitted inflated cargo invoices
for goods shipped to U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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 DoJ
Targets 11
Swiss Banks
DoJ is pursuing 11
Swiss banks, telling them they must hand over thousands of
client names and pay
$3 billion in fines to avoid
tax evasion prosecution in the United States.
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 Merck to Pay
$24 Million
Merck
has agreed to pay $24 million to the state of Massachusetts for
price-gouging the state
on Medicaid
drugs.
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 Ranbaxy to Pay $500
Million
Indian generic drug maker Ranbaxy Laboratories says it has
signed an agreement with the U.S. FDA to pay
$500 million
to settle charges that the company
fabricated bioequivalency and
stability data in order to sell HIV/AIDS drugs to
the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief program
(PEPFAR).
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 Denver Hospital
to Pay $6.3 Million
Denver
Heath Medical Center has agreed to pay
$6.3 million to settle
charges it overbilled Medicare and Medicaid by
misclassifying "outpatients" or "observation" patients as inpatients.
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 Serious Trouble at BNY Mellon
Documents filed as part of a whistleblower lawsuit in
Florida show the extent of the problems faced by
Bank of New York Mellon,
which has been charged with cheating state pension funds in
currency exchange transactions. The court
documents include a
step-by-step guide to how
currencies
were traded and internal profits were racked up, and even
details where documents were stashed in a central
repository. When one employee learned
BNY Mellon, as well as
State Street Bank, was under investigation for currency-trading, she reportedly told her
co-workers that,
"It's over, it's all over." |
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 Success
and the SEC
Securities and Exchange Commission
Chairman Mary Schapiro says
the SEC's new
whistleblower program is already yielding results, and that
lawmakers should not try to "fix" a program that is not
broken.
"Making significant
changes in the program before it has had an opportunity
to demonstrate its full value seems premature,
particularly in the absence of any evidence of problems
with the current program" said Schapiro
in a letter to
Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA). |
 Record Whistleblower
Recoveries
In FY 2011, the Justice Department secured
more than $3 billion
in settlements and judgments in civil cases
involving fraud against the government. Of
this amount, a record $2.8 billion was under the
whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act.
FY 2011 was also a big year for pharma fraud recoveries,
with prescription dugs accounting for
$2.2 billion in civil claims
against drugmakers,
including $1.76 billion in federal civil recoveries
and $421 million in state Medicaid recoveries.
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 What Could Go Wrong?
Kaiser Health News reports that
hospitals are adopting drug industry
sales strategies, by hiring
employees to make "sales calls" on doctors in the hope that this will result in more patient referrals. Tenet Healthcare,
for example, has doubled
its sales force in the past
two years. Tenet, of course, is a repeat player in the
fraud arena, racking up record health care frauds on
multiple occasions.
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 Medtronic
to Pay
$23.5 Million
Medtronic has agreed to pay
$23.5 million
to settle cardiac defibrillator and pacemaker cases. This is just one more in a series of False
Claims Act settlements made by Medtronic. Previous
cases were settled for $40 million (2006, kickbacks) and $75
million (2008, spinal implants).
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 SEC Chases Big
Mortgage Fraudsters
Mortgage giants Freddie
Mac and Fannie Mae are under the gun for massive fraud.
Six former top executives at
the companies are being sued by the SEC which says
executives misled investors over the mortgage finance
companies' exposure to risky
home loans. Since 2008,
the two companies have only stayed above water thanks to $169 billion in
federal loans. In related news, New York Attorney
General Eric Schneiderman and Steve Linick, the inspector
general of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, have signed
an agreement to
share documents and findings
related to Fannie and Freddie.
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 Bomb Case Settled for
$4.75 Million
The Kaman Corporation
has agreed to pay
$4.75 million
to settle a False Claims Act case alleging the company sold
untested fuses to the U.S. Government for
BLU-109 and BLU-113 "bunker
buster" bombs. |
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