Whistleblower Group

FDAGate -- The Latest Lapse in Government Enforcement

By Gordon Schnell In what quickly has become the most recent "gate" scandal in Washington, the evidence continues to mount that the FDA acted to stifle whistleblowers within its own ranks.  It all began several years ago when a half-dozen FDA scientists and doctors objected to certain imaging devices for mammograms and colonoscopies because of the high levels of radiation they believed the equipment emitted.  The...

Big Pharma Strikes Again – Glaxo Settles Largest Healthcare Fraud Case in History

By Jason Enzler Earlier this month, GlaxoSmithKline entered into the largest settlement in healthcare fraud history -- a whopping $3 billion -- to settle a broad range of criminal and civil charges involving the company’s drugs and marketing practices.  Glaxo’s settlement easily surpasses the previous record for healthcare fraud, Pfizer’s $2.3 billion payout in 2009 to settle criminal and civil charges for...

The IRS Whistleblower Office -- A New Beginning or Just a Lot of Lip Service

By Gordon Schnell Since its inception in 2007, the IRS Whistleblower Office has been subject to some fairly withering attacks.  And for good reason.  It was supposed to revamp the IRS whistleblower system, encouraging tipsters to flood in and help the government identify all of those tax cheats and their billions of dollars in unpaid taxes each year.  The whistleblowers have certainly done their part.  They...

Business is Booming at the SEC Whistleblower Office as Tips Continue to Flood In

By Jason Enzler The SEC’s Whistleblower Office is busy these days as tips continue to stream into the agency.  Thomas Sporkin, the chief of the SEC’s Office of Market Intelligence, the unit that assesses the credibility of these tips, recently stated that the agency is receiving an average of seven tips per day, with about 2 or 3 of them meriting investigation.  Many of these tips are coming from senior...

Low Scores for Government Efforts to Clean Up Medicare/Medicaid Fraud

By Gordon Schnell The Government Accountability Office (GAO), the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, just issued a relatively unflattering report on the government's internal efforts to clean up Medicare and Medicaid fraud.  According to the report, the government makes more than $60 billion in improper Medicare and Medicaid payments every year because of fraud, waste and abuse of the system.  This comes...

Hear No Evil – The Increased Risk for Companies That Ignore or Retaliate Against Whistleblowers

By Marlene Koury Corporate misconduct is at an all-time high, according to a recently-issued report titled Inside the Mind of a Whistleblower, from the Ethics Resource Center (ERC).  The ERC reported that up to 45 percent of U.S. employees said that they had observed misconduct at various levels in the workplace during 2011.  This conduct included falsifying financial reporting information, engaging in...

Show Me the Money – Large Rewards as an Indispensable Piece of the Whistleblower Enforcement System

By Gordon Schnell In yet another corporate attempt to upend the surging success of the American whistleblower system, the US Chamber of Commerce recently proposed a cap on whistleblower rewards.  Under the False Claims Act as well as the recently implemented whistleblower provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, whistleblowers are entitled to between 15% and 30% of any government recovery.  This has...

Shattering the Myth of the Whistleblower as a Rogue and Disloyal Employee

By Gordon Schnell In its recently issued report titled Inside the Mind of a Whistleblower, the Ethics Resource Center (ERC) has made some surprising findings on how whistleblowers behave.  Perhaps the most surprising of all is that virtually none of them   -- a mere 3% -- go directly to the government to report the fraud or misconduct they have witnessed.  Instead, they first work within their company to expose...

Looking for a Few Good Whistleblowers

By Gordon Schnell  Last week, the Justice Department put out a formal call to arms for whistleblowers with inside information on fraud or misconduct relating to residential mortgage-backed securities.  These are those nasty bundles of questionable mortgages that financial institutions for years traded like monopoly money and which ultimately triggered the financial meltdown that began in 2008.  After all of this...