DOJ Trendlines
In 2024, more whistleblowers came forward to report fraud than ever before.
As we have each year on Fraud by the Numbers, we are looking at the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) annual False Claims Act (FCA) statistics for the prior year.[1]
As DOJ recognized in its own press release, 2024 set a remarkable record for new qui tam lawsuits filed by whistleblowers: almost a thousand (979) qui tam cases were filed in 2024.
Not only is 979 a record number, it is significantly higher than the prior record in 2013, when 752 new qui tam cases were filed.
The growth in new qui tam suits is encouraging. FCA lawsuits recovered over $2.9 billion for the federal government in 2024. Of that amount, about $2.4 billion came from qui tam lawsuits. While $2.4 billion is an impressive number, it is about the same amount that was recovered through qui tam lawsuits in 2023, as the below chart shows.
Notably, of the 979 new qui tam lawsuits in 2024, 575 were “Non-HHS and Non-DOD” cases—meaning they were not cases about healthcare or defense spending. [2] Typically, a large majority of filed qui tam lawsuits relate to healthcare spending, although the “Non-HHS/DOD” cases have been steadily increasing since the Covid-19 pandemic.
We do not know why there are so many new non-HHS/DOD cases, although many of them could still be related to Covid relief programs, particularly the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan program. Fraud on these programs was certainly the cause of a large portion of new cases filed since the start of the pandemic. In 2024, these cases began to pay off for the taxpayer, as DOJ reports that $250 million of FCA recoveries in 2024 were for pandemic-related fraud.
It is worth dwelling on how unusual it is that $881 million of the $2.4 billion recovered through qui tam lawsuits in 2024 were for non-HHS/DOD cases.
As the above chart shows, non-HHS/DOD recoveries were a relatively small part of annual FCA recoveries over the past decade, while healthcare recoveries have consistently been the largest part. But the chart shows that the amount recovered by healthcare FCA cases has remained about the same since 2020, while non-healthcare cases took up the slack in 2023 and 2024.
Finally, the below chart, which we have previously published and have updated for 2024, shows the ratio of the government’s recoveries under the False Claims Act relative to the amount of total federal spending.[3] In 2024, the government spent $6.75 trillion (a massive increase relative to the $3.69 trillion spent in 2015), and recovered $2.4 billion allegedly lost to fraud through qui tam lawsuits (about 0.035% of total spending).
The chart suggests that the government has a great deal of room for growth in its use of its most powerful tool to fight fraud, the qui tam whistleblower lawsuit. Therefore, we are confident that 2024’s record number of new qui tam lawsuits will bear fruit in the years ahead.
[1] All references to 2024 and prior years refer to the fiscal year, which in 2024 ran from October 1, 2023 to September 30, 2024.
[2] New FCA qui tam actions are filed in secret (under court seal), which means we do not have publicly available information on individual new cases, only high level categorical data provided by DOJ.
[3] The figures for total federal spending are taken from the Office of Management and Budget’s Historical Tables.
This piece was written by Nicolas Mendoza, Senior Associate at Murphy Anderson.
