Fraud By The Numbers Series
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The Need For Whistleblowers in the Motor Vehicle Industry
It will not surprise you to learn that the motor vehicle industry is big business. Toyota’s global revenue for the fiscal year before the pandemic was more than $274 billion, with North American Vehicle sales at 2.7 million units. Ford had $127 billion in revenue for the calendar year 2020 during the pandemic and announced…
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Troubling Trends in Defense False Claims Act Cases
Over the past three decades, the Department of Defense budget has more than doubled, growing from $287.4 in fiscal year 1987 to $723.2 billion in fiscal year 2020. Of the 2020 amount, an estimated $420 billion was spent on private contractors. As described in yesterday’s post, fraud remains a major area of concern in the…
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The Need for More Whistleblowers In The Defense Industry
Although we’ve been discussing healthcare fraud a lot during this month, the original purpose of the 1863 False Claims Act and the 1986 amendments that modernized the statute had one particular aim: to combat fraud in defense spending. Since 1986, defense spending has continued to grow, as has the reliance on private contractors. Over the…
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How Over $1 Trillion In State Government Spending Is Vulnerable to Fraud
Many people know that the federal and state False Claims Acts are potent tools in the fight against healthcare fraud, but some may not realize that these statutes can also apply outside the healthcare realm. The 50 states and DC allocate about 68 percent of their total budgets to non-healthcare programs. As we’ve discussed earlier…
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Private Insurers May Dole More Than $200 Billion Each Year to Fraudsters
The federal and state False Claims Acts permit whistleblowers to file lawsuits alleging that someone has committed fraud against the government. In the context of healthcare, this means government healthcare programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. But private health insurance companies are also susceptible to fraud. Private health insurance plays a significant role in America’s…
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Let’s Take a Look at Fraud Against State Medicaid Programs
In the last few days, we’ve been discussing the impact of fraud on the federal healthcare programs, but whistleblowers also play an important role in fighting fraud in state healthcare programs like Medicaid. Some experts estimate that fraud accounts for as much as 20 percent of government healthcare spending.[1] This means that, through Medicaid and…
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Let’s Take a Look at How DOJ Task Forces Fight Fraud
Healthcare and defense, while massive, are not the government’s only expenditures susceptible to fraud. The vast array of government programs and the enormous sums expended to advance those programs means the government needs ways to efficiently and effectively root out fraud. Oftentimes, the government attempts to do so by forming a task force to address…
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Why Combatting Healthcare Fraud Is Getting More Important
For fiscal year 2021, $1.2 trillion was allocated to Medicare (which in 2019 covered more than 58 million people). By 2028, Medicare expenditures are projected to reach $1.56 trillion (to cover approximately 75 million people). There are a number of drivers of this growth, but the primary one is the anticipated growth in Medicare enrollment.…
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Highlighting Whistleblowers on Patient Safety Day
Today, we are turning back to healthcare because the World Health Organization has declared September 17th Patient Safety Day. Established in 2019, Patient Safety Day was created to raise awareness of the need to make patient safety a global health priority and to bring stakeholders together in an effort to reduce the incidence and severity…
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How the Government Combats Tax Fraud
Any discussion about fraud on the government would not be complete without a discussion about tax fraud. Tax fraud may involve a failure to pay federal taxes, but it also includes cheating states and localities out of revenue they rely on to operate critical programs. According to the IRS, about $1 trillion in federal taxes…
