With the nation’s health care costs growing, a DOJ and HHS initiative to combat health care fraud continues to show progress. Building on past enforcement efforts, in May 2009 the government announced its Health Care Fraud Prevention and Enforcement Action Team (HEAT), as part of what is now a Cabinet-level…
Defrauding the government of taxpayer dollars has gotten tougher over the past five months. Important changes to the nation’s primary anti-fraud statute, the False Claims Act, took effect on May 20, 2009, when the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009 became law. Among the most significant changes, Congress clarified…
At the “Advanced Health Law” seminar on October 9, attorneys prosecuting and defending cases of alleged health care fraud will discuss the important new amendments to the False Claims Act. I am honored to be the panelist who will discuss these important new provisions from the perspective of representing whistleblowers…
In one of two prominent whistleblower cases in the news this week, whistleblower John Kopchinski will be awarded more than $50 million for his role in exposing improper “off-label marketing” of the drug Bextra by Pfizer. Other whistleblowers also will be rewarded because of this settlement. That settlement of $2.3…
We have followed closely the trend of states enacting their own versions of the nation’s chief whistleblower law the False Claims Act. North Carolina has become the newest state to enact its own False Claims Act, which is reprinted below. We congratulate the State of North Carolina on a momentous…
At the 20th Annual Convention of NELA, the National Employment Lawyers Association, I recently had the pleasure of moderating a panel discussion of some of the country’s top “whistleblower” lawyers. The topic was “The Most Pressing Issues in Representing Whistleblowers.” Joining me in this panel discussion were Richard Renner and…
New legislation to combat financial institution fraud, securities fraud, mortgage fraud, and other fraud and abuse is gaining momentum, and brings closer long-needed amendments to restore to its intended strength the nation’s major “whistleblower” law, the False Claims Act. The Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009 (S. 386) received…
I am very excited about co-chairing the Annual “Whistleblower Law Symposium” once again this week. From Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, San Antonio, and Washington, D.C., many of the country’s leading attorneys in whistleblower cases under the “qui tam” statute, the False Claims Act, the Sarbanes-Oxley statute, and the IRS…
Hidden schemes to defraud Medicare and state Medicaid programs of scarce taxpayer dollars are at the heart of many whistleblower cases under the federal and state False Claims Acts. This morning, Wisconsin Attorney General J. B. Van Hollen announced that a Dane County, Wisconsin jury has just declared that a…
In our former life as lawyers defending False Claims Act cases, our defendant clients had to consider whether the payments made to settle qui tam cases under the False Claims Act were deductible for tax purposes, and to what extent. The IRS recently issued a paper on the subject: whether…