December 10, 2015

New Jersey announced that Accutest Laboratories would pay the State $2 million to resolve allegations that it deviated from both federal and state requirements for the extraction and testing of certain compounds, thereby submitting false claims to the State and its agencies for payment. The State and its agencies – including the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) – had contracted with Accutest to perform a variety of environmental tests in its extraction laboratory. The allegations central to today’s settlement flow from a federal qui tam or “whistleblower” lawsuit filed two years prior by a former Accutest employee, Koroush Vaziri. The New Jersey Attorney General said that the settlement was the largest non-Medicaid-related False Claims Act settlement entered into by the State since New Jersey’s False Claims Act took effect in March 2008. NJ

Tagged in: Environmental Fraud,