False Claims Act Update & Alert
Taxpayers Against Fraud Education Fund | Washington, D.C. | WWW.TAF.ORG February 3, 2006
		Sign Up for this FREE Newsletter n Previous Newsletters n TAF Home Page n About TAF-EF n The False Claims Act n Email editor Please take a moment to forward this FREE electronic newsletter to others that might be interested!	Congress Creates New Tools to Fight Medicaid Fraud With passage of the the Deficit Reduction Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 2005 (S.1932), Congress has forged two new tools to combat Medicaid fraud.  n Incentives for State FCA's:  Section 6031 of the new budget reconciliation bill would increase state awards from False Claims Act litigation by 10 percentage points if the state has adopted a state False Claims Act law as strong as the federal version.  For example, if a state's federal matching rate is 57 percent, it would typically receive only 43 percent of the amount recovered from the fraudfeasor. However, if the State has enacted a qualifying False Claims Act, its share of any recovery would increase by 10 percentage points, to 53 percent of any amount received under its False Claims Act. (In this example, the states share of the recovery effectively increases by 23 percent!) n Required False Claims Act Education: Section 6032 of the new budget reconciliation bill requires any entity that receives or makes annual Medicaid payments of $5 million or more to include in their employee handbook a detailed discussion of the provisions of the federal and states False Claims Acts, including the rights of whistleblowers. Jim Moorman, President of Taxpayers Against Fraud, praised Congress, and Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) in particular, for providing new tools to fight fraud. "At a time when federal deficits are soaring, and approximately 25% of all state budgets are being spent on Medicaid, everything possible needs to be done to discourage and ferret out fraud against this important health care program," said Moorman.  "We hope these two new provisions will result in more states suiting up to bring Medicaid cheats to justice." In anticipation of the law's passage, Taxpayers Against Fraud has produced a model state False Claims Act statute, which can be downloaded from its web site.  >> To read the model law (PDF)