On February 7, 2023, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that settlements and judgments under the False Claims Act exceeded $2.2 billion during the 2022 fiscal year and that the government posted its second-highest number of settlements and judgments in a single year.
While most of that enforcement activity—about 77 percent—was aimed at the healthcare industry, DOJ’s press release highlighted the Department’s Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative as well, noting that 2022 saw DOJ’s first settlement pertaining to the initiative, when a Florida-based medical services provider paid $930,000 to resolve allegations that it falsely represented that it had complied with contract requirements relating to the provision of medical services at State Department and Air Force facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among other issues, the company’s representations involved the level of security of the electronic medical records system it agreed to utilize, with the government alleging that the defendant failed to disclose that it had not consistently stored patients’ medical records on a secure system, and instead put copies of some records on an internal, unsecured, network drive.
In July 2022, a second cybersecurity FCA action reached settlement, when Aerojet Rocketdyne agreed to pay $9 million to resolve FCA allegations that it misrepresented its compliance with cybersecurity requirements in certain of its federal government contracts. While a subsequent address by Brian M. Boynton,...
This story is the second in an ongoing series on the Cost of Fraud, as Open the Books tallies the hidden fees on American tax returns. Click here to read the first story on fraudulent autism billi...