- Prosecution for profit: False Claims Act, empowering private lawyers to sue businesses on behalf of the state and rake off 25 percent bounty for themselves, passes House of Delegates on near-party line vote [roll call, text, Chamber view, COST on tax-dispute angle]
- Senate votes 36-8 to decriminalize marijuana [Capital Gazette, WBAL] U-MD paper covers panel discussion I was on recently in College Park [Diamondback]
- Fiasco of state’s ObamaCare exchange continues to resonate [Petula Dvorak, WaPo; picking up and starting over; Geoffrey Norman, Weekly Standard]
- Cronyism in hospitality politics discourages the less well-connected [Vinny Sidhu, Point of Law]
- Committee kills proposed first-in-nation ban on sale of energy drinks to minors [CBS Baltimore, Assembly]
- Time to rein in Maryland’s license-plate-recognition surveillance system? [Capital News Service, earlier]
- Much lauded by politicos, Frederick Housing Authority-assisted “first net-zero energy neighborhood in the nation” flounders amid financial, legal, logistical setbacks [Frederick News-Post]
Posts Tagged ‘qui tam’
“Lawsuit Accuses Whistleblower Law Firm Of Coaching Employee To Steal Documents”
Following its loss in a California trial, J.M. Eagle, a large manufacturer of industrial pipe, is pushing back hard against its qui tam legal adversaries. [Daniel Fisher/Forbes, Plastics News] Earlier on the False Claims Act here and here.
The state of False Claims Act litigation
The docket keeps expanding and Legal NewsLine is out with a story quoting me and others:
…“In recent years, you’ve seen some pushback from the business community, but given the record of congressional expansion, they’ll be doing pretty well if they can just keep Congress from expanding it further,” said Olson, who also founded and still runs the popular blog Overlawyered.com. …
The Department of Justice announced in December that it secured $3.8 billion in settlements and judgments from civil cases involving fraud against the government in 2013. According to the office, the amount represents the second largest annual recovery of its type in history and brings total recoveries under the False Claims Act to $17 billion since January 2009….
Olson explains that the business community’s growing discontent over the False Claims Act includes concerns over incentives for whistleblowers. In many cases, the whistleblower either participated in the misconduct, or knew about the misconduct but failed to inform their company.
He adds that in worse cases, whistleblowers intentionally ignored misconduct so damages would pile up and result in a “better bounty.”
“These are all incentives that are at odds with the wish that employees be ethical and loyal to their employers, and are also sometimes at odds with the object of minimizing fraud,” Olson said.
Much more, including more quotes from me, at the link; related Peter Hutt interview piece.
February 3 roundup
- “Class counsel in Facebook ‘Sponsored Stories’ case seeks to impose $32,000 appeal bond on class-action objectors” [Public Citizen, Center for Class Action Fairness]
- The best piece on bar fight litigation I’ve ever read [Burt Likko, Ordinary Gentlemen]
- Casino mogul Adelson campaigns to suppress online gaming; is your state attorney general among those who’ve signed on? [PPA, The Hill]
- Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA): “Anyone who values the rule of law should be alarmed by the ADM enforcement action.” [Mike Koehler]
- New FMCSA rules on length of workweek make life difficult for long-haul truckers [Betsy Morris, WSJ via Lee Habeeb and Mike Leven, National Review and more]
- “It takes a remarkable amount of nerve to cobble together publicly available facts, claim you’ve uncovered a fraud on the government, and file a lawsuit from which you could earn substantial financial benefits.” [Richard Samp, WLF] Whistleblower-law lobby tries to get its business model established in West Virginia [W.V. Record]
- Pittsburgh readers, hope to see you tomorrow at Duquesne [law school Federalist Society]
January 10 roundup
- Faking a Sept. 11 injury would seem basically as disgraceful as faking a war injury, no? [NY Post, Legal Ethics Forum; earlier on Ground Zero compensation here, here, here, here, here (2008 fraud), here, etc. ]
- “Illegal Aliens May Get License to Practice Law in California” [Volokh, earlier] A curious companion headline from only three and a half years ago, and also from California: “Government seeks forfeiture, managers’ prison time for hiring illegal aliens”
- A look back at the Keller Satanic-ritual-abuse case from Texas [Slate]
- Piacentile v. Amgen case “offers a little window into the ugly side of the qui tam business” [Steve McConnell, Drug and Device Law; related from same blog on case of U.S. ex rel. Watson v. King-Vassel, here and here]
- “Father and Daughter Sentenced in $1.5 Million Insurance Fraud Case” [San Diego D.A.]
- Michael McConnell in the Yale Law Journal on religious freedom;
- Child support law madness, Virginia division [Hans Bader]
“Whistleblowers coming from compliance departments”
Much more rewarding to act as a government informant than to help the employer address the problem: “Allegations of wrongdoing within a company often surface in the compliance department, which often is involved in internal investigations and receives employee complaints. Like other employees, compliance staff can under various statutes submit information on potential wrongdoing for whistleblower awards or claim retaliation for raising concerns about alleged wrongdoing.” [WSJ via CompliancEX]
War — what is it good for?
If you’re the federal government, one thing it’s good for is to turn a losing claim — losing because filed too late — into a possible winner. It works through something called the Wartime Suspension of Limitations Act (WSLA), enacted by Congress in 1942 as the U.S. entered World War Two, and I explain it in this guest column for Jurist.
Discrimination law roundup
- After being slapped down by courts, EEOC concentrates on filing fewer but bigger cases [Sue Reisinger, Corporate Counsel] EEOC scores in Cintas, UPS cases [Legal Times]
- SCOTUS grants certiorari in retaliation mixed motives case [University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar, SCOTUSBlog via Marcia McCormick, Workplace Prof]
- False Claims Act could be potent weapon for discrimination plaintiffs [Texas Law Review student note by Ralph Mayrell, PDF via Bagenstos]
- Religious liberty compatible with gay rights so long as ambitions of anti-discrimination law aren’t allowed to run wild [Eugene Volokh as part of UCLA conference on Roe’s 40th and Lawrence’s 10th anniversary] Case of Ocean Grove, N.J. pavilion is still regularly cited as infringement on church autonomy, but it’s not that simple, since it hinges on untypical “public use” covenant of property in question [Box Turtle Bulletin]
- For a more genuine menace to religious liberty, however, watch out for the notion of taking the Bob Jones University precedent — in which courts upheld the stripping of an educational institution’s tax exemption due to its backward racial views — and extending it into a weapon for denying tax exemption to the much broader class of institutions said to contravene “fundamental public policy” [Caroline Maia Corbin, Concurring Opinions]
- More on the deaf lifeguard case [Jon Hyman, earlier]
- New York Gov. Cuomo seeks one-way fee awards in state bias cases [Reuters]
Qui tam suits against for-profit colleges
The WSJ editors wonder to what extent the feds, who have been pursuing a campaign lately to bring the colleges to heel, are coordinating with the private False Claims Act bar. Meanwhile, Rogier at Nobody’s Business spots some ironies in the Justice Department’s suit against Education Management Corp.: “pushing low- to medium-value degrees is something that law schools — including some of the best in the country — do habitually, every day. All of higher education does, with no exceptions I’m aware of.”
An unconstitutional patent false-marking statute
Along with the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies, I’ve filed an amicus brief (a first for me) urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to recognize the constitutional flaws in the federal “false marking” statute, which empowers private parties to sue over inaccurate (in practice, mostly expired) patent markings on products and collect fines of a generally criminal/punitive as opposed to civil/compensatory nature. Here’s our argument in a nutshell, from the Cato website:
Read On…