A substantial part of our practice as Whistleblower Attorneys is representing ordinary people (known as relators) in qui tam actions under federal and state False Claims Acts. A qui tam action is simply a lawsuit that a private person files in the name of the federal or state or local government which typically alleges that the government is a victim of some type of fraudulent scheme. If the qui tam lawsuit is successful and the defendant ends up paying money back to the government, then the qui tam relator gets a percentage of those proceeds (known as the relator’s share). This financial reward is for alerting the government to difficult-to-detect fraud by starting the qui tam lawsuit, and, in many cases, for assisting the government in its investigation and litigation of the whistleblower’s allegations. Also, regardless of the outcome of the qui tam action, the relator is protected from retaliation by his or her employer for engaging in covered whistleblowing activities. We do not charge our clients hourly fees for serving as qui tam lawyers; we only receive contingency fees from relator’s shares from successful qui tam cases and damage awards from successful whistleblower retaliation claims, plus statutory fees paid by the defendants.

A lot of people wonder why so many of the reported qui tam whistleblower cases involve fraud against Medicare, Medicaid and other government healthcare insurance programs. It’s similar to what Willie Sutton said when asked why he robbed banks (“Because that’s where the money is”), explains Healthcare Fraud Attorney Timothy McInnis. Healthcare is one of the biggest categories of government expenditures, so it’s only natural that it would be subject to large amounts of program fraud. While fraudulent healthcare billing schemes may take many forms (billing for services never rendered, upcoding diagnoses and procedures, filing duplicate claims, failing to comply with CMS regulations, and so on) and also occur in different types of healthcare settings (hospitals, doctor practice groups, pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers), the one thing they all have in common is that some person or some organization submits an invoice or claim to the government asking to get paid for providing a service or product when the claimant knows the they are not entitled to the requested amount. Thus, when someone knowingly misrepresents, lies about or covers up important facts concerning healthcare claims they are committing fraud. Filing a qui tam whistleblower suit under the federal or states false claims act is one way to alert the government about such false and fraudulent healthcare billing activity, and in many cases, to help recover money on behalf of the American taxpayers