Category: News

We have now seen our second Foreign Corrupt Practices Act settlement involving vendor payments over the past three weeks as Johnson Controls settled its SEC investigation for $14 million and Analogic previously agreed to pay nearly $15 million to the SEC and DOJ. Johnson Controls Johnson Controls released a press release today concerning the settlement of its...

Almost a year ago (September 2015), the Internal Revenue Service announced the reorganization of its Large Business and International (LB&I) Division. Struggling to keep up with the nearly 300,000 taxpayers within its jurisdiction, and faced with significant declines in the IRS budget from the Congressional appropriation process, LB&I is moving to issue-focused examinations of taxpayer...

Government’s Veto Power The Fourth Circuit in U.S. ex rel. Michaels v. Agape Senior Community (Agape) has been asked to decide two important issues in False Claims Act lawsuits: (1) whether the Government can veto a settlement reached between the relator and defendant in a non-intervened case, and (2) whether statistical sampling can be used to prove...

Senator Warren and two other Congressional members proposed the Derivatives Oversight and Taxpayer Protection Act into Congress at the end of June in order to allow self-funding of the CFTC and increase its authority for civil penalties, among other things.   As I understand the funding proposal, the CFTC would be allowed to assess and...

Governments across the world continue to recognize the importance of whistleblowers with agencies in Germany and Canada opening up whistleblower programs to collect information about violations of their laws. Australia has extended its consideration of whistleblower rewards to include international tax avoidance, which it is studying. And Ontario Canada’s program to reward whistleblowers for information...

The statutory penalties for each false claim or false statement will nearly double as the U.S. Government adjusts the False Claims Act fines for inflation. Under the Civil Monetary Penalties Inflation Adjustment pursuant to the provisions of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015, the new minimum fine for each violation of the FCA will be $10,781, with a maximum...

The Customer Protection Rule was the subject of a $415 million settlement last week by Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch. It was the largest ever for misuse of client funds under Rule 15c3-3. According to media reports, former executives of the bank provided information to the U.S. Government through the SEC Whistleblower program. After the...

The Southern District of New York has seen a resurgence in government lawsuits over insider trading in 2016 following a 2015 decline that has been attributed by commentators to the Second Circuit’s decision in U.S. v. Newman. The U.S. Attorney’s Office there, led by Preet Bharara, has filed charges against 11 individuals so far this year, a...

The Supreme Court on Thursday handed down a unanimous decision in U.S. ex rel. Escobar v. Universal Health Services, Inc. to resolve the circuit split over the validity of the implied certification theory of liability under the False Claims Act. The case involved services billed to the U.S. Government’s health care programs by unlicensed providers acting without...