Richard Strassberg and William Harrington
On Dec. 21, 2017, the Department of Justice published its annual False Claims Act year-in-review, outlining the statistics of its False Claims Act bounties from the prior year. The publication serves as a reminder and warning to health care companies and government contractors that reckless mismanagement will prove costly. And the eye-popping numbers serve as a siren song for would-be whistleblowers to come forward with their inside information of wrong doing. Lawyers and executives study this announcement, and others like it, as a forewarning about where the Government will focus its efforts next. But, at the same time, there have also been some unmistakably discordant notes in the messages from the DOJ and other branches of government about the dangers of excessive enforcement under the False Claims Act.
DOJ Annual Review
In the Annual Review for 2017, the DOJ announced that it collected over $3.7 billion in settlements and judgments under the false claims, bringing total collections to $56 billion since Congress reformed the False Claims Act in 1986. In glowing terms, the DOJ release described the year’s cases as “a message to those who do business with the government that fraud and dishonesty will not be tolerated.” And indeed it is.
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