Whistleblower News From The Inside -- August 28, 2017
By the C|C Whistleblower Lawyer Team
New SCOTUS Brief in Dodd-Frank Whistleblower Case: SEC Doesn’t Deserve Deference – The Senate confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch provided a rare moment in the spotlight for the Chevron doctrine, the Supreme Court’s holding that when laws are ambiguous, courts must defer to statutory interpretations from the executive-branch agencies Congress has empowered to enforce those laws. Justice Gorsuch, as you probably recall, argued as a judge on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that the Chevron doctrine may well be an unconstitutional encroachment on the power of the judicial branch. His controversial musings on Chevron deference thrust the obscure administrative law doctrine into headlines. Reuters
IRS Asks DC Circ. To Nix $13M In Whistleblower Fees – The IRS urged the D.C. Circuit on Thursday to roll back a Tax Court ruling that provided almost $13 million in additional whistleblower awards to a husband and wife who helped catch a foreign corporation evading federal income tax, arguing certain monies should be excluded in the fee calculation. The Internal Revenue Service said the Tax Court erred by including criminal fines and civil forfeitures in the calculation of “collected proceeds” upon which the award would be based under the Internal Revenue Code’s whistleblower statute, claiming Congress only intended such awards to be based on amounts collected for violations of the internal revenue laws and not amounts collected under various other federal statutes that provide funding for other federal programs. Law360
Hooked, hoodwinked: Some drug rehabs aim for relapse and $$$ – The Reflections treatment center looked like just the place for Michelle Holley’s youngest daughter to kick heroin. Instead, as with dozens of other addiction treatment centers in Florida, the owner was more interested in defrauding insurance companies by keeping his patients hooked, her family says. “It looked fine. They were saying all the right things to me. I could not help my child, so I trusted them to help my child,” Holley said. Instead, the center refused to give 19-year-old Jaime Holley her prescription medicine when she left, forcing her to use illegal drugs to avoid acute withdrawal symptoms, her mother said. She died of a heroin overdose last November. “Right to my face they lied to me, and I believed them.” The St. Augustine Record