Just yesterday (and much earlier in the year than it has recently), the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) released its annual False Claims Act (FCA) statistics for Fiscal Year (FY) 2024. The government’s FCA recoveries increased for a third straight year and nearly eclipsed $3 billion — the annual mark DOJ typically hit in the decade before the pandemic. This figure is now back to familiar territory and, as DOJ’s press release noted, could have been markedly higher if big settlements it reached in October (including one with Raytheon for more than $400 million) had come a few weeks earlier. Nevertheless, many of the other metrics in DOJ’s report reflect a changing FCA landscape. Let’s dive into the numbers.
Looking at the breakdown of DOJ’s total of $2.92 billion, we see a continuation of a trend that has emerged in the past few years: the shrinking share of healthcare recoveries in the overall FCA mix. To be sure, healthcare-related recoveries still account for the majority of FCA recoveries, but for the second year in a row they are less than two-thirds of the total. This year’s healthcare recoveries clocked in at $1.68 billion, or about 57% of the total.
So what has been taking healthcare’s place in the sights of DOJ and relators? This year, at least, it was not defense-related recoveries, which made up a relatively small $93 million, making this only the third year in the past 10 in which defense recoveries fell below $100 million. Rather, this year saw a large figure —...
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