The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) has agreed to pay the United States $2 million to resolve federal civil fraud allegations that its hospital defrauded Medicaid, it double billed medicaid for outpatient physicians and in house doctors.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Monday, June 08, 2009
Supreme Court Limits Appeal Time to 30 days For Non-Intervened Cases
The United States Supreme Court issued an opinion 6-8-2009 in U.S. ex rel. Eisenstein v. City of New York giving relators in non-intervened cases only 30 days to appeal. Most circuit courts had held that the United States was a party to all FCA qui tam cases, even after declining to intervene, which then allowed relators 60 days to appeal.
Monday, October 09, 2006
Update on the Pogo case. Pretrial is set for 10-11-2006 to deal with Appellate ruling overturning the District Court decision.
U.S. District Court
District of Columbia (Washington, DC)
CIVIL DOCKET FOR CASE #: 1:03-cv-00096-JDB
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA et al v. THE PROJECT ON GOVERNMENT OVERSIGHT et al Assigned to: Judge John D. Bates Demand: $50,000 Cause: 28:2201 Injunction | Date Filed: 01/21/2003 Jury Demand: Defendant Nature of Suit: 370 Fraud or Truth-In-Lending Jurisdiction: U.S. Government Plaintiff |
Saturday, August 19, 2006
Custer Battles Jury Verdict Overturned
Just out from the AP Custer-Battles jury verdict overturned. Unbeleivable
that the judge reopended this issue after trial. It is just hard to
understand the reluctance of some judges to let the jury do its job.
Judge Overturns Verdict
Against Iraq War Contractor
Associated Press
August 18, 2006 6:04 p.m.
ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- A federal judge has overturned a $10 million jury verdict
against a military contractor accused of defrauding the U.S. government in
the initial months of the Iraq war.
The verdict, awarded in March against Fairfax-based Custer Battles LLC, had
been the first civil fraud verdict arising from the Iraq war.
A former Custer Battles employee filed the lawsuit under a whistleblower
statute, alleging that Custer Battles used shell companies and false
invoices to vastly overstate its expenses on a $3 million contract to assist
in establishing a new currency to replace the old Iraqi dinar used during
Saddam Hussein's regime.
The verdict reached $10 million because the law calls for triple damages,
plus penalties fines and legal costs.
But U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III, in a ruling made public Friday,
ruled that Custer Battles's accusers failed to prove that the U.S.
government ever was defrauded. Any fraud that occurred was perpetrated
instead against the Coalition Provisional Authority, formed shortly after
the war to run Iraq during the occupation until an Iraqi government was
established.
Judge Ellis ruled that the trial evidence failed to show that the U.S.
government was the actual victim, even though U.S. taxpayers ultimately
footed the bill.
Alan Grayson, lawyer for whistleblowers Robert Isakson and William Baldwin,
said he will appeal the ruling. Mr. Grayson said the Bush administration
tried to portray the CPA as an international entity for public relations
purposes when in reality it was wholly controlled by the U.S. "Everybody
seems to agree that the defendant committed fraud ... but now you have a
situation where the judge is puzzled about what he can do about it," Mr.
Grayson said.
In pretrial motions, Custer Battles's lawyers had advanced a similar
argument about CPA's status. At that stage, Judge Ellis allowed the trial to
go forward and said a case could be made to show that defrauding CPA is
tantamount to defrauding the U.S. During that pretrial debate, Judge Ellis
prodded the Justice Department to weigh in on its assessment of the CPA's
status. Eventually, government lawyers argued that the CPA should be
considered a U.S. entity, but only for the purpose of the whistleblower law.
Judge Ellis said in his ruling that the plaintiffs failed to establish CPA
as a U.S. entity during the three-week trial earlier this year. Custer
Battles's attorneys portrayed Judge Ellis's ruling as a broad vindication of
their clients' actions.
"The fact of the matter is that [Custer Battles founders] Scott Custer and
Mike Battles did what they were contracted to do under unimaginably
difficult circumstances," defense lawyer Robert Rhoad said in a statement.
In his ruling, though, Judge Ellis makes clear that he is overturning the
verdict only on the technical question of whether the CPA is a U.S. entity.
"If the CPA was a U.S. entity, the result differs dramatically," Judge Ellis
wrote.
Another defense attorney, David Douglass, acknowledged that Judge Ellis's
ruling turns on the narrow legal question of whether the CPA was a U.S.
entity. Because the judge found for the defendants on that, he never had to
revisit the jury's finding that the defendants overbilled and submitted
fraudulent invoices. "We believe there was no evidence of fraud," Mr.
Douglass said.
A civil suit involving an even larger Custer Battles contract to provide
security at Baghdad International Airport has not yet gone to trial. Mr.
Grayson said that lawsuit will face similar obstacles.
Copyright � 2006 Associated Press
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115593723928839759.html
Hyperlinks in this Article:
(1) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115076836185284796.html
(2) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114541197558329560.html
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Average citizens don't break the law in the first place. But corporations seem to do it with virtual impunity. Despite a few examples in the media many are avoiding penalties for their criminal acts. Check out the following story from the AP:
Corporations Stiffing Government on Fines
Corporations Stiffing Government on Fines
By MARTHA MENDOZA and CHRISTOPHER SULLIVAN
The Associated Press
Sunday, March 19, 2006; 5:51 AM
When a gasoline spill and fiery explosion killed three young people in Washington state, officials announced a record penalty against a gas pipeline company: $3 million to send the message that such tragedies "must never happen again." When nuclear labs around the country were found exposing workers to radiation and breaking other safety rules, assessments totaling $2.5 million were quickly ordered. When coal firms' violations were blamed for deaths, injuries and risks to miners from Alabama to West Virginia, they were slapped with more than $1.3 million in penalties. What happened next with these no-nonsense enforcement efforts? Not much. The pipeline tab was eventually reduced by 92 percent, the labs' assessments were waived as soon as they were issued, and the mine penalties largely went unpaid. The amount of unpaid federal fines has risen sharply in the last decade. Individuals and corporations regularly avoid large, highly publicized penalties for wrongdoing -- sometimes through negotiations, sometimes because companies go bankrupt, sometimes due to officials' failure to keep close track of who owes what under a decentralized collection system. These are conclusions of an Associated Press examination of federal financial penalty enforcement across the nation, which also found:
The government is currently owed more than $35 billion in fines and other payments from criminals and in civil cases, according to Justice Department figures. This is almost five times the amount uncollected 10 years ago -- and enough to cover the annual budget of the Department of Homeland Security. A decade ago, Congress mandated that fines be imposed regardless of defendants' ability to pay, which has added tremendously to outstanding debt.
Thursday, February 16, 2006
This article below from the Christian Science Monitor exposes efforts to suppress internal information flows. I believe that the failure to tolerate dissonant information could become a source of systemic crisis for our nation.
As an American Friends Service Committee Board member, I have been very concerned with DOD spying on local activists against war in violation of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act (barring the military from conducting local law enforcement activities). The DOD spying would not have come to light as it did in Newsweek a few weeks ago without brave whistleblowers. The fraud, corruption, and waste of the war effort that is coming to light, and the chance for corrective action within and without the government, cannot take place if such information is blocked. Our nation is "healthy" to the extent that it can tolerate peaceful dissent and heed the warnings of informed citizens.
These ideas are not original to me. They were elegantly postulated 40 years ago by Karl Deutsch. Deutsch determined that institutional information disruption was pathological. Deutsch (1966) postulated that a national system's long-term prospects depend on the integrity of informational flows. He defines integrity as "the unimpaired functioning of the facilities that carry the processes of self-determination" (p. 131). A biologist from the 1930s, Cannon (1932), recognized that "the integrity of the organism as a whole rests on the integrity of its individual elements, and the elements, in turn, are impotent and useless save as parts of the organized whole" (p. 309).
Integrity, as used and defined by these eminent scholars, is impaired by disrupting information flows from the past, from internal sources, or from external sources, or by overloading an informational channel. Lost integrity compromises systemic autonomy. The system then loses "power to change goals and to add new ones," and systemic survival becomes problematic (Deutsch, 1966, p. 140). Information disruption destroys integrity and imperils the organism's "health" by generating "pathological traffic patterns" (Deutsch, 1966, p. 137). These pathological patterns themselves become a source of disruption, and as the pathology becomes self-sustaining.
The failure of authoritarian states should inform our nation that authoritarian behavior, although in the short term expediant, in the long run leads to failure. The range of examples that I find interesting includes the old Soviet Union, Apartheid South Africa, Argentina under the dictators, the Czech's velvet revolution, and the fall of East Germany.
A Surge in Whistle-Blowing ... and Reprisals
By Gail Russell Chaddock
The Christian Science Monitor
Thursday 16 February 2006
Congress eyes tricky question of blowing the whistle in wartime.
Washington - Dissent often carries a price in official Washington, especially in the war years of the Bush presidency. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the number of insiders alleging wrongdoing in government - either through whistleblower channels or directly to the press - has surged, as have reprisals against them.
That's the message from this week's congressional hearing on protections for national security whistleblowers - the first in more than a decade. "The system is broken," says Rep. Christopher Shays (R) of Connecticut, who chaired the House Government Affairs subcommittee hearing.
Disclosures of flawed prewar intelligence, secret prisons and prisoner abuse, and warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency have launched a debate on the conduct of the war on terror within Congress and the American public. Critics say some of those disclosures also compromised national security.
"At the Central Intelligence Agency, we are more than holding our own in the global war on terrorism, but we are at risk of losing a key battle: the battle to protect our classified information," wrote CIA director Porter Goss in The New York Times last Friday.
The struggle over dissent in dangerous times is not confined to national security matters, however. It appears to be settling deeper into the federal bureaucracy, where government scientists and even analysts at the scholarly Congressional Research Service - who are not actually blowing any whistles but who are staking out positions that deviate from the administration's - report efforts to control their contact with the press and public.
If whistleblowers and others "do not see an option for dissent within the system, then the system is in bad shape," says Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. "Secrecy has become a growth industry.... It makes it harder for ordinary citizens ... to ask questions ... and to hold officials accountable."
The lips-stay-sealed climate is felt most acutely, at least these days, by those in national-security fields. Indeed, a Justice Department investigation is under way to discover who divulged the existence of warrantless eavesdropping by the NSA - a probe that may yield criminal charges against the individuals responsible.
Richard Levernier is one who went public with his security concerns - and feels he's paid a heavy price. He first reported security breaches at the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons sites to management. Seeing no changes, he released an unclassified report to the media. While government investigators found his concerns credible, he lost his security clearance. Four years later, he's unemployed and, he says, unemployable.
"I spent my whole life in the nuclear security business. And you can't get a key to the men's room without a clearance," says Mr. Levernier, one of five whistleblowers who spoke Tuesday before the Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Relations.
Army Spc. Samuel Provance was demoted after disobeying an order not to speak to the press about prisoner mistreatment at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. "Young soldiers were scapegoated, while superiors misrepresented what had happened.... I was ashamed and embarrassed to be associated with it," he told the House panel.
Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer lost his security clearance after testifying to the 9/11 Commission and Congress about Operation Able Danger, a program that he says tagged four 9/11 hijackers before the attacks.
Former FBI special agent Michael German and former intelligence officer Russell Tice also testified that they felt they'd been retaliated against for speaking out about problems, and both lost their security clearances.
"Security clearance revocation is the new harassment of choice against national security workers," says Thomas Devine, legal director for the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit public-interest law firm in Washington that assists whistleblowers.
While federal workers have had whistle-blower protection since 1989, a 1999 US court ruling requires these workers to have irrefutable evidence of waste, fraud, or abuse to be eligible for protection. Last year, House and Senate committees each passed bills that strengthened protections for whistleblowers, but neither bill has come to the floor for a vote. Only the Senate version includes national security whistleblowers.
Outside the realm of national security, James Hansen, the top climate scientist at NASA, spoke out about efforts by the NASA press office to screen his speeches and limit his contact with the press.
In response, Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R) of New York, chairman of the House Science Committee, backed Dr. Hansen. "Good science cannot long persist in an atmosphere of intimidation," he wrote to NASA administrator Michael Griffin. Mr. Griffin e-mailed all NASA employees, affirming that staff should not alter, filter, or adjust scientific work.
But Hansen says the issue is not yet resolved, citing a pending investigation by the House Energy and Commerce Committee challenging the scholarship of other scientists working on global warming.
When lawmakers on the House panel asked what other issues they should heed, watchdog groups cited the case of Louis Fisher, a senior analyst at Congressional Research Service.
His office door is papered with book jackets from his works, many of them on congressional-executive relations. When Mr. Fisher spoke publicly about a report he wrote on national security whistleblowers, CRS managers warned him not to take positions on issues before Congress.
"CRS researchers are instructed from the time they're hired that their role is an educative one, not an advocative one," Daniel Mulhollan, CRS director, wrote in an e-mail statement. "If CRS is to serve all members of Congress ... it must be understood to be equally valuable to those on competing sides of an issue."
The warning set off protests from political scientists and public-interest groups. "The CRS has been severely compromised," says William Weaver, a political scientist at the University of Texas in El Paso and a founder of the National Security Whistle-blowers Coalition.
Says Fisher himself: "For the last 33 years my job was to defend legislative prerogative and constitutional government, and suddenly that's a bad thing to do. There are mixed signals inside this [CRS] house. People are hunkered down."
As an American Friends Service Committee Board member, I have been very concerned with DOD spying on local activists against war in violation of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act (barring the military from conducting local law enforcement activities). The DOD spying would not have come to light as it did in Newsweek a few weeks ago without brave whistleblowers. The fraud, corruption, and waste of the war effort that is coming to light, and the chance for corrective action within and without the government, cannot take place if such information is blocked. Our nation is "healthy" to the extent that it can tolerate peaceful dissent and heed the warnings of informed citizens.
These ideas are not original to me. They were elegantly postulated 40 years ago by Karl Deutsch. Deutsch determined that institutional information disruption was pathological. Deutsch (1966) postulated that a national system's long-term prospects depend on the integrity of informational flows. He defines integrity as "the unimpaired functioning of the facilities that carry the processes of self-determination" (p. 131). A biologist from the 1930s, Cannon (1932), recognized that "the integrity of the organism as a whole rests on the integrity of its individual elements, and the elements, in turn, are impotent and useless save as parts of the organized whole" (p. 309).
Integrity, as used and defined by these eminent scholars, is impaired by disrupting information flows from the past, from internal sources, or from external sources, or by overloading an informational channel. Lost integrity compromises systemic autonomy. The system then loses "power to change goals and to add new ones," and systemic survival becomes problematic (Deutsch, 1966, p. 140). Information disruption destroys integrity and imperils the organism's "health" by generating "pathological traffic patterns" (Deutsch, 1966, p. 137). These pathological patterns themselves become a source of disruption, and as the pathology becomes self-sustaining.
The failure of authoritarian states should inform our nation that authoritarian behavior, although in the short term expediant, in the long run leads to failure. The range of examples that I find interesting includes the old Soviet Union, Apartheid South Africa, Argentina under the dictators, the Czech's velvet revolution, and the fall of East Germany.
A Surge in Whistle-Blowing ... and Reprisals
By Gail Russell Chaddock
The Christian Science Monitor
Thursday 16 February 2006
Congress eyes tricky question of blowing the whistle in wartime.
Washington - Dissent often carries a price in official Washington, especially in the war years of the Bush presidency. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the number of insiders alleging wrongdoing in government - either through whistleblower channels or directly to the press - has surged, as have reprisals against them.
That's the message from this week's congressional hearing on protections for national security whistleblowers - the first in more than a decade. "The system is broken," says Rep. Christopher Shays (R) of Connecticut, who chaired the House Government Affairs subcommittee hearing.
Disclosures of flawed prewar intelligence, secret prisons and prisoner abuse, and warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency have launched a debate on the conduct of the war on terror within Congress and the American public. Critics say some of those disclosures also compromised national security.
"At the Central Intelligence Agency, we are more than holding our own in the global war on terrorism, but we are at risk of losing a key battle: the battle to protect our classified information," wrote CIA director Porter Goss in The New York Times last Friday.
The struggle over dissent in dangerous times is not confined to national security matters, however. It appears to be settling deeper into the federal bureaucracy, where government scientists and even analysts at the scholarly Congressional Research Service - who are not actually blowing any whistles but who are staking out positions that deviate from the administration's - report efforts to control their contact with the press and public.
If whistleblowers and others "do not see an option for dissent within the system, then the system is in bad shape," says Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. "Secrecy has become a growth industry.... It makes it harder for ordinary citizens ... to ask questions ... and to hold officials accountable."
The lips-stay-sealed climate is felt most acutely, at least these days, by those in national-security fields. Indeed, a Justice Department investigation is under way to discover who divulged the existence of warrantless eavesdropping by the NSA - a probe that may yield criminal charges against the individuals responsible.
Richard Levernier is one who went public with his security concerns - and feels he's paid a heavy price. He first reported security breaches at the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons sites to management. Seeing no changes, he released an unclassified report to the media. While government investigators found his concerns credible, he lost his security clearance. Four years later, he's unemployed and, he says, unemployable.
"I spent my whole life in the nuclear security business. And you can't get a key to the men's room without a clearance," says Mr. Levernier, one of five whistleblowers who spoke Tuesday before the Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Relations.
Army Spc. Samuel Provance was demoted after disobeying an order not to speak to the press about prisoner mistreatment at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. "Young soldiers were scapegoated, while superiors misrepresented what had happened.... I was ashamed and embarrassed to be associated with it," he told the House panel.
Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer lost his security clearance after testifying to the 9/11 Commission and Congress about Operation Able Danger, a program that he says tagged four 9/11 hijackers before the attacks.
Former FBI special agent Michael German and former intelligence officer Russell Tice also testified that they felt they'd been retaliated against for speaking out about problems, and both lost their security clearances.
"Security clearance revocation is the new harassment of choice against national security workers," says Thomas Devine, legal director for the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit public-interest law firm in Washington that assists whistleblowers.
While federal workers have had whistle-blower protection since 1989, a 1999 US court ruling requires these workers to have irrefutable evidence of waste, fraud, or abuse to be eligible for protection. Last year, House and Senate committees each passed bills that strengthened protections for whistleblowers, but neither bill has come to the floor for a vote. Only the Senate version includes national security whistleblowers.
Outside the realm of national security, James Hansen, the top climate scientist at NASA, spoke out about efforts by the NASA press office to screen his speeches and limit his contact with the press.
In response, Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R) of New York, chairman of the House Science Committee, backed Dr. Hansen. "Good science cannot long persist in an atmosphere of intimidation," he wrote to NASA administrator Michael Griffin. Mr. Griffin e-mailed all NASA employees, affirming that staff should not alter, filter, or adjust scientific work.
But Hansen says the issue is not yet resolved, citing a pending investigation by the House Energy and Commerce Committee challenging the scholarship of other scientists working on global warming.
When lawmakers on the House panel asked what other issues they should heed, watchdog groups cited the case of Louis Fisher, a senior analyst at Congressional Research Service.
His office door is papered with book jackets from his works, many of them on congressional-executive relations. When Mr. Fisher spoke publicly about a report he wrote on national security whistleblowers, CRS managers warned him not to take positions on issues before Congress.
"CRS researchers are instructed from the time they're hired that their role is an educative one, not an advocative one," Daniel Mulhollan, CRS director, wrote in an e-mail statement. "If CRS is to serve all members of Congress ... it must be understood to be equally valuable to those on competing sides of an issue."
The warning set off protests from political scientists and public-interest groups. "The CRS has been severely compromised," says William Weaver, a political scientist at the University of Texas in El Paso and a founder of the National Security Whistle-blowers Coalition.
Says Fisher himself: "For the last 33 years my job was to defend legislative prerogative and constitutional government, and suddenly that's a bad thing to do. There are mixed signals inside this [CRS] house. People are hunkered down."
Monday, January 02, 2006
I don't know the outcome of this situation and would like comments but I was interested in the attack on the Project On Government Oversight ("POGO") for its investigation into oil royalties for oil taken by major companies from public land. POGO filed a lawsuit against 16 companies because the companies were purposely under-reporting the price of the oil they were extracting thereby reducing their royalty payments. At the settlement of the portion of its suit against Mobile Oil, POGO agreed to give two government workers, Bob Berman and Bob Spier each one third of its $1.1 million cut of a $45m settlement.
Congress then started an investigation and subpoenad POGO documents. This also triggered a DOJ investigation of POGO even though Spier and Berman could have filed the suit on their own (Government workers are allowed to file FCA suits as long as they're not investigators and as long as they've tried to go through the system to the maximum degree possible).
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