by bvernia | November 19th, 2009
At a press conference today, Civil Division Assistant Attorney General Tony West announced DOJ’s FCA recoveries for the fiscal year which ended on September 30. According to the DOJ press release, the US recovered $2.4 billion under the False Claims Act, bringing to more than $24 billion the total recoveries since the 1986 amendments which revitalized the FCA.
Some highlights:
- $2 billion, or 83% of the recovery, came from qui tam suits
- Relators received $255 million (12.75%) in awards
- Healthcare fraud amounted to $1.6 billion, 2/3 of the total
- Pharmaceutical and device settlements provided the largest healthcare recoveries
- State Medicaid programs received $402 million from pharmaceutical and device cases
- Procurement fraud recoveries totaled $608.4 million
- $422 million in DOD cases
- $59 million relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including large settlements with Boeing and APL Limited.
- Two record recoveries:
- Largest Medicare/Medicaid recovery: $540 million from State of New York and New York City
- Largest General Services Administration recovery: $128.7 million from NetApp Inc. and NetApp U.S. Public Sector, Inc., in a defective pricing case
(DOJ’s computation for FY09 does not include the record $2.3 billion settlement with Pfizer Inc. Although that agreement was signed at the end of August, the Company was not obligated to pay the settlement amount until after the District Court in Massachusetts accepted the guilty plea of its subsidiary, Pharmacia & Upjohn Co., Inc. That happened on October 16, and so DOJ will count those dollars in its FY10 report.)
