A federal judge on Monday dismissed a long-running lawsuit against a Peraton subsidiary over the provision of background investigation services to the Office of Personnel Management.
It ends an eight-year dispute following which KeyPoint Government Solutions agreed to settle with the U.S. government for an undisclosed sum. According to attorneys for the plaintiff, 29% of the settlement figure will be paid to whistleblower Julie Reed who initially a qui tam lawsuit against the company in 2014. KeyPoint has also agreed to pay an additional sum towards Reed’s legal fees.
In light of the settlement, federal judge Christine M. Arguello dismissed the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado.
The conclusion of the lawsuit comes amid heightened interest from the Department of Justice in False Claims Act litigation. In October last year, the department launched its new Cyber-Civil Fraud Initiative and said it would use all available resources to protect whistleblowers who come forward with useful information.
KeyPoint settled the case after U.S. Federal Court of Appeal judges in 2019 issued an opinion that established the validity of Reed’s qui tam lawsuit — one in which a whistleblower brings action against a party on the government’s behalf — but rejected the plaintiff’s retaliation claim.
That prior opinion overturned an earlier district court ruling, which at the time dismissed Reed’s claim because it found her evidence did not provide the government...
A front-page article with the byline of veteran New York Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristof is the latest poisonous example of what I call the NGO “halo effect.” Headlined “The Silence That Mee...