Category: Federal False Claims Act
A report recently released by the Government Accountability Office (Congress’ investigational arm) found that recruiters at for-profit colleges in the United States lied to entice students to apply and encouraged them to commit fraud to qualify for government-backed financial aid. The GAO report found that recruiters at all 15 colleges studied misled students about the costs and quality of their programs of study,
On August 3, 2010, Panalpina Inc., one of the world’s leading forwarding and logistics services, agreed to settle a False Claims Act suit filed several years ago by a whistleblower on behalf of the U.S. government. The suit alleged that a former Panalpina employee provided unlawful entertainment to employees of Kellogg,
Last week, Tenet Healthcare acknowledged, in a regulatory filing, that the United States Department of Justice is investigating whether one of Tenet’s hospitals fraudulently billed Medicare for heart defibrillator implant surgeries. The D.O.J. probe dates to March 2010, when it issued a demand to Tenet under the False Claims Act seeking information and patient records detailing Tenet’s submissions for implantable heart defibrillator procedures as far back as 2002.
On August 2, 2010, Hewlett-Packard announced that it reached an agreement in principle with the United States Department of Justice to settle both an ongoing government investigation and two False Claims Act suits related to allegations that HP, Accenture, and Sun Microsystems paid millions of dollars in unlawful kickbacks to secure government technology contracts.
The Center for Diagnostic Imaging (“CDI”), one of the nation’s largest providers of diagnostic imaging services for doctors and hospitals, recently agreed to pay at least $1.2 million to settle an allegation of Medicaid billing fraud. CDI’s decision to settle followed on the heels of the federal government’s announcement last week that it intended to intervene and pursue the billing fraud issue on behalf of whistleblowers Dr.
Wilfred Van Gorp, widely known for his declaration that Oddfather Vincent (Chin) Gigante was truly crazy, a claim later soundly rejected based on recorded telephone conversations, was found by a Manhattan federal jury, along with Cornell University, to have violated the federal False Claims Act. According to the claims of the suit,
On Wednesday, July 21, 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The law provides sweeping new consumer protections in the form of ending certain predatory consumer lending and providing stricter regulatory oversight of consumer credit mortgages. Further, the new law seeks to halt “over the counter”
Elan Corporation, plc, of Dublin, Ireland has agreed to settle claims related to the marketing of Zonegran, an anti-epileptic drug for which it sold the rights to a Japanese company in 2004. In January of 2006, Elan admitted that the the DOJ and the Department of Health and Human Services were looking into its marketing practices,
Today, President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act into law. This sweeping legislation will impact fraud enforcement and whistleblower cases. We will be posting more information about the new law in the days to come.
See also http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/21/AR2010072100512.html
Orange County, California-based National Cardio Labs LLC has finalized a settlement with the government to pay $3.6 million to resolve allegations that the company knowingly submitted false claims for heart monitoring services. From January 1998 through February 2004, National Cardio allegedly billed Medicare, TRICARE, and the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program for event monitoring services,
