March 2, 2023, marked the 160-year anniversary of the enactment of the False Claims Act (FCA). Signed into law by the sixteenth president, the statute known as “Mr. Lincoln’s Law” was passed in response to the actions of contractors that sold rancid food, faulty rifles, and shoddy uniforms to the Union Army. Eight score after the law’s passage, the FCA has become the government’s primary enforcement tool in cases involving allegations of fraud, and today the Civil War era statute is applied in cases involving industries and federal programs that would have exceeded Lincoln’s wildest imagination.
The “Informers Act” Has Lived Up to Its Name
At the time of its passage in 1863, the FCA was also referred to as the Informer’s Act due to the law’s provisions allowing individuals to bring suit in the name of the government in exchange for a bounty. 160 years later, the qui tam provisions remain a defining feature of the law’s enforcement, and whistleblower-initiated suits continue to be the government’s primary source of new referrals. The Department of Justice began keeping track of FCA settlements and judgments following the 1986 amendments to the statute that were aimed at promoting more FCA suits by whistleblowers. Of the $72 billion recovered under the FCA since 1986, more than $50 billion came from cases that were initiated by qui tam relators. Similarly, relator-initiated actions continue to be the main driver of new case openings. Of the 948 new FCA matters that were...
The Newsboys’ federal lawsuit is pushing back strongly against past allegations that a woman was raped by a Newsboys lighting technician and it asserts that the report was false and contradicted b...