In confirmation hearings this week, the Trump administration’s nominee for attorney general, Jeff Sessions, vowed this week that he would use his position as America’s “top cop” to continue to fight fraud against taxpayers.
“[T]his government must improve its ability to protect the United States Treasury from waste, fraud, and abuse,” Sessions told the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday. “We cannot afford to lose a single dollar to corruption and you can be sure that if I am confirmed, I will make it a high priority of the department to root out and prosecute fraud in federal programs and to recover any monies lost due to fraud or false claims.”
Sessions, currently a Republican U.S. senator from Alabama, is a former federal prosecutor with a long history of being tough on white-collar crime. His remarks before the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmed that he would carry this “law-and-order” attitude toward dealing with fraud into his new role as attorney general.
There is little political will in the Senate to oppose Sessions’s confirmation, making it a near-certainty that he will become America’s next attorney general when President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20.
Carrying the Torch
For its part, the Obama administration is going out on a strong note as far as whistleblowers and cracking down on fraud are concerned. As the Wall Street Journal recently noted, the Justice Department has collected $31.3 billion under the False Claims Act since 2009—more than during the three prior presidential administrations combined.
The volume of whistleblower cases also increased under the Obama administration, with 702 cases filed in fiscal year 2016 versus 433 in 2009.
Since 1986, the DOJ has collected $53 billion in cases under the False Claims Act, the key federal whistleblower law that deputizes ordinary people to root out fraud, waste, and abuse against the government that they observe in their workplaces. The False Claims Act’s qui tam provisions incentivize whistleblowers (called “relators” in False Claims Act parlance) to come forward by allowing them to share a portion of the recovery in successful cases.
In fiscal year 2016 alone, the DOJ collected $4.7 billion in False Claims Act cases, according to the Wall Street Journal. Relators collected $519.6 million.
Focus on Healthcare
Much of that recovery came from massive healthcare fraud cases. These including a $784.6 million settlement with pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and many eight- and nine-figure settlements with nursing homes and other rehabilitative care providers accused of overbilling Medicare, Medicaid, and the military healthcare system TRICARE.
In October, Life Care Centers of America agreed to pay $145 million to settle allegations under the False Claims Act that it systematically overbilled Medicare and TRICARE. And earlier in the year, RehabCare—the nation’s largest nursing home therapy provider, with contracts at over 1,000 special needs facilities in 44 states—and its parent company Kindred Healthcare agreed to pay $125 million to settle a suit brought by two False Claims Act relators.
Every year, American taxpayers lose billions of dollars to healthcare fraud. Whistleblowers are crucial to rooting out healthcare fraud because the Department of Justice and other investigative bodies simply cannot audit the millions of claims submitted for payment each year to root out the false claims. Conscientious employees who witness healthcare fraud, abuse, and waste in their workplaces are in the best position to (and often the only ones who can) come forward to fight for justice.