The Department of Justice has recently announced its year end statistics and the results are exciting for anyone who wants to see fraudsters paying back their ill-gotten gains to the taxpayers. Highlights include:
-Nearly five billion dollars recovered (more than $4.7 billion) in settlements and judgments. And this does not consider additional money returned to state Medicaid programs.
-About $2.5 billion of that money – about 53% — came from health care-related matters.
-Whistleblowers filed 702 qui tam suits in fiscal year 2016.
-Nearly three billion ($2.9 billion) came from whistleblower actions that settled or otherwise ended in 2016.
-The government awarded whistleblowers (collectively) about $519 million in 2016 on these federal cases, which is about 17.89%. This includes both intervened cases (for which the relator’s share is between 15% and 25%) and non-intervened cases (for which the relator’s share is between 25% and 30%).
-From January 2009 to the end of fiscal year 2016, the federal government recovered almost $24 billion from qui tam suits and paid more than $4 billion in whistleblower awards!