Whistleblower News

For more than a decade, the Senate Whistleblower Protection Caucus has led an effort to designate July 30 as “National Whistleblower Appreciation Day,” celebrating whistleblowers’ contributions and risking their livelihoods and reputations to combat legal and regulatory violations, waste, fraud and abuse in the United States. The July 30 designation is no accident. The American tradition of supporting whistleblowers dates back to July 30, 1778. Just two years after the United States was … [Read more...]

Billions of dollars in pandemic-related fraud remains unresolved, and the government is relying on whistleblowers to enforce consequences for misuse of public funds.  During the past fiscal year, the U.S. Department of Justice resolved about 270 False Claims Act matters tied to improper Paycheck Protection Program loans. The related settlements and judgments amounted to $48.3 million — the whistleblowers who stepped forward to expose these frauds received awards as provided for in the False … [Read more...]

About a third of Americans who make it to their 65th birthdays will need nursing home care, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In 2021, Medicare spent $92.6 billion on skilled nursing facility care and home health services. Unfortunately, fraud is particularly problematic in nursing homes, where vulnerable patients live away from loved ones. When care is motivated by financial gain, it also puts patients’ lives at risk.  Both the state and federal governments … [Read more...]

Medicare Advantage, also known as Medicare Part C, has become the country’s largest taxpayer-funded health insurance program with more than 31 million participants. But as annual expenditures for the program have tripled over the past decade to $450 million, fraud is on the rise as well.  According to a New York Times report, the Department of Justice and whistleblowers have pursued False Claims Act cases against at least half of the top 10 Medicare Advantage providers. Also, the U.S. … [Read more...]

The nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office, in a first-of-its-kind report, has produced an estimate of how much money the federal government is losing each year to fraud. It’s not only a staggering figure — $233 billion to $521 billion annually — but of even greater concern is the amount of undetected fraud in that estimate. According to GAO statistics, confirmed fraud in fiscal years 2018 to 2022 ranged from $4.41 billion to $7.31 billion annually, a fraction of the GAO’s annual … [Read more...]