On Thursday, DOJ’s Civil Division announced FOCUS: the Fraud Oversight through Careful Use of Statistics initiative. The initiative is a reminder to potential False Claims Act defendants that whistleblower risk can originate from both insiders and outsiders—but that lawsuits brought by outsiders relying on publicly available information may continue to be met with skepticism, particularly where the whistleblower's theory rests on statistical inference rather than direct evidence of fraud.

Context

The False Claims Act (FCA) is one of the federal government’s most potent anti-fraud statutes. It authorizes whistleblowers (known as relators) to file civil actions in the government’s name, alleging that a defendant knowingly submitted (or caused the submission of) false or fraudulent claims for payment. These whistleblower-initiated actions are known as qui tam cases.

Recent years have seen significant growth in the volume of whistleblower filings, with records broken in FY 2024 (980) and FY 2025 (1,300) and are on pace to be broken again in FY 2026. Typically, relators are individuals with inside information. But according to DOJ, since 2024 nearly half of all filings have come from “data miners”: people or entities who analyze publicly available data to identify signals of potential fraud.

SBA pandemic-relief programs and the observed “success gap”

DOJ points to whistleblower actions related to pandemic assistance loans. The Small Business Administration (SBA) publicly...

Read Full Story: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiigFBVV95cUxQUldoNjlzR0g5ZFkzZ1F6S3FK...