Fraud By The Numbers Series
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An Ounce of Prevention is Worth Billions for a Cure
Were you stuck in an airport this summer when flights around the world were grounded by a security update by Crowdstrike that took out computers at airports, hospitals and financial institutions? Preliminary damage estimates from that incident are already more than $5.4 billion. Or maybe you were impacted by the Change Healthcare hack that impacted…
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Which U.S. Attorneys’ Offices Brought in the Highest Recoveries in the Past Five Years?
That’s the question we wanted to answer, by reviewing settlements and judgments in False Claims Act cases by each U.S. Attorney’s office. The last time Fraud by the Numbers reported on the U.S. Attorney’s offices, we looked at the full history back to the institution of the modern version of the Act amended in 1986.…
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DOJ’s Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative: A Milestone in Cybersecurity Enforcement
DOJ’s Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative: A Milestone in Cybersecurity Enforcement In October 2021, the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) launched its Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative, a pioneering effort to use the False Claims Act to prosecute (1) government vendors that knowingly provide the government deficient cybersecurity products and services, and (2) government contractors that knowingly misrepresent their cybersecurity…
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The Government Spends Much Less on Fraud Cases than Big Companies Spend Defending Them
As we have previously discussed on Fraud by the Numbers, the government has a limited number of lawyers working on False Claims Act (FCA) cases. For each FCA case that is filed, the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) assigns an Assistant U.S. Attorney (AUSA) in the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the federal district court in which…
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Pill Talk: Negotiating, Lobbying, and Inflating Drug Prices
The government spends a lot of money on Medicare and Medicaid. And the numbers are only getting larger. By 2030, it is projected that Medicaid spending will exceed $700 billion. A massive portion of this spending goes towards prescription drugs. How did we get here, and is it possible to reduce the government spending? Pharmacy…
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CFTC Whistleblowers: An Underfunded Program For an Underfunded Agency
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is fifty years old this year. Its whistleblower awards program is fourteen years old. But this long-established agency and its whistleblower program remain perennially underfunded. The CFTC’s jurisdiction is broad and expanding with the advent of cryptocurrencies. The CFTC regulates the derivatives markets, including futures contracts, options, and swaps,…
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Based on Past, DOJ’s New Whistleblower Program Could Yield Big Recoveries for Taxpayers
The Department of Justice (DOJ) recently unveiled a new whistleblower program, the Criminal Division Corporate Whistleblower Awards Pilot Program, on August 1, 2024. This new program enables eligible whistleblowers who report information about corporate and financial misconduct potentially to receive an award from the resulting forfeiture. The new program is designed to fill gaps that…
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Troublesome Trends in Crypto Crime
Since the launch of Bitcoin in 2009, cryptocurrency has surged in popularity, generating immense wealth for some individuals and immense financial losses for others. Though its resounding volatility has caused some traders and investors to reap significant gains, it has likewise caused immense losses, significantly so from the 2022 crypto crash. Volatility is not the…
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Fraud is Taxable, Too!
What happens when a fraudster not only defrauds a Government program, but then fails to pay taxes on the ill-gotten gains? The Government’s primary fraud-catching tool, theFalse Claims Act,[1] doesn’t apply to the tax side. Instead, the IRS has its own Whistleblower Program (WP), administered by its Whistleblower Office, to address tax fraud.[2] In Fiscal…
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Kickbacks Come in All Shapes and Sizes
As we reported earlier this month, 2023 marked a banner year in False Claims Act recoveries. The government and whistleblowers were party to 543 settlements and judgments, “the highest number of settlements and judgments in a single year,” totaling over $2.68 billion. Notably, as in prior years, “unlawful kickbacks,” remained a stated government priority: Unlawful…
