Morgan Stanley Agrees to Settlement Morgan Stanley Investment Management has agreed to pay $8.8 million to resolve an investigation into mortgage backed securities that its portfolio manager parked at a broker before buying back the securities into other customer accounts on favorable terms. The brokerage firm, SG Americas, has agreed to pay more than $1...
End of the Year Settlements It must be the last weekend before Christmas because health care companies are looking to resolve government investigations into their wrongdoing before we leap into the new year! In the last two days, we’ve now seen four multi-million dollar settlement announcements in False Claims Act cases. A pharmaceutical company settled...
Settlement Agreements for JP Morgan An investigation into the adequacy of disclosures to clients of its wealth management business has resulted in a settlement of $367 million with U.S. securities regulators to resolve their investigations into the practices at JPMorgan. JPM clients were steered toward certain mutual funds and hedge funds without disclosing the bank’s...
Insurance Fraud Whistleblowers The majority of work we do for whistleblowers reporting health care fraud involves cases of fraud against the US Government’s Medicare and Medicaid programs under the False Claims Act. However, a recent press release from an attorney settling a case in California reminds us that there are two states which allow private...
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission will settle an investigation into manipulation of the natural gas market with a subsidiary of French oil company Total SA and a Houston gas trader for $3.6 million, according to a press release today. The company was accused of manipulating monthly index settlement prices through natural gas prices at...
Bloomberg is reporting that investment banks are under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for manipulation of the credit default swap market. Employees or former employees of investment banks with information about their price manipulation or collusion in the CDS market should consider contacting an attorney for assistance reporting the evidence to the SEC...
Whistleblower Rewards are High Whistleblowers helped the Justice Department recover $2.8 billion in fiscal year 2015. For their assistance, they received nearly $600 million in rewards, which I believe is a record. The largest area of recoveries was in the health care industry. Total payments in cases to the federal government for health care fraud reached $1.9...
CFTC Whistleblower Program Review The Office of the Inspector General has refocused on an investigation of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Whistleblower Office to determine why there have been fewer awards concerning violations of the Commodity Exchange Act or CFTC rules as a result of Dodd-Frank and to recommend best practices. The CFTC has now...
Internal or External Audits Pale in Comparison Fraud within companies is on the rise and whistleblowers are playing a crucial role in helping detect it, according to the eighth annual Global Fraud Report produced by Kroll and released in late November. Three quarters (75%) of companies responding to the survey suffered a “fraud incident” within...
The U.S. Government Accountability Office has issued a report on the IRS whistleblower program following a year long audit of the program, its operation and the underlying data generated. The 2015 report concludes that the financial incentives of the rewards program have led to billions collected but that delays and communications problems may discourage whistleblowing....