The Department of Justice (DOJ) is restructuring the way it prioritizes whistleblowers who file fraud-related lawsuits on behalf of the government as a result of their data mining efforts.
A qui tam claim is a lawsuit brought by a private individual against a person or company defrauding the government. Those suits are made under the False Claims Act, which rewards the whistleblower with 15% to 30% of the amount recovered by the government.
On April 30, the DOJ launched its Fraud Oversight through Careful Use of Statistics (FOCUS) initiative, which it said will prioritize False Claims Act filings from data miners deemed high quality. Data miners analyze publicly available government data for identifiers of fraud.
Through the FOCUS initiative, DOJ said it will work with data miners who “demonstrate an insightful application of sophisticated technological capabilities to regulatory frameworks to help identify potential fraud that would otherwise go undetected.”
That move follows a sharp increase in the number of qui tam complaints filed in recent years. A DOJ report from January stated that nearly 1,300 qui tam suits were filed in fiscal year (FY) 2025, up from the previous record of 980 set in FY 2024. More than $85 billion in settlements and judgments under the False Claims Act have been recovered since 1986, with $6.8 billion coming from FY 2025 alone, DOJ added.
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