News & Cases

UBER national lawsuit? After settling the Uber driver lawsuits in California and Massachusetts, the company is up against its greatest legal challenge yet – a high profile activist driver with a billion dollar lawyer known for holding mega corporations accountable.
UBER is arguably the gig economy's biggest financial success. In mid-2015, it was valued at $50 billion. By January 2016, the last round of investments reportedly brought it up to $62.5 billion. The transportation giant...

Philips Respironics Inc. is forking over $34.8 million to resolve allegations it paid illegal kickbacks to its sleep apnea mask customers who are DME (durable medical equipment) suppliers, the Justice Department announced Wednesday. Pharmacist Dr. Gibran Ameer was awarded $5.38 million as a reward for blowing the whistle on Respironics. The federal government is recovering over $28.7 million of the settlement for taxpayers while the remaining $660,000 will go to defrauded state Medicaid programs.

Respironics’ Fit-For-Life Program Alerts Pharmacist to Kickback Arrangement

South Carolina pharmacist, Dr. Gibran Ameer, has worked for a number of medical supply companies in his career. He was serving as an executive for one of Respironics’ supplier customers when they allegedly offered his company their “Fit-For-Life” program – an allegedly illegal kickback deal to persuade him to sell their sleep apnea masks....

In one of the biggest settlements of its kind to date, U.S. drug giant Pfizer has entered a tentative agreement to pay $784.6 million to settle long-running allegations that drug manufacturer Wyeth overcharged Medicaid for its heartburn medication Protonix. The two whistleblowers who brought the initial claims under the False Claims Act stand to split a whistleblower award of nearly $59 million.

Tip of the Big Pharma Fraud Iceberg says Whistleblower Lawyer

“The conduct of Big Pharma is shocking,” said prominent U.S. fraud recovery and whistleblower attorney Brian Mahany, who has aided in the recovery of billions for the taxpayers through his representation of whistleblowers nationwide. “This case against Pfizer is not an isolated incident. The big drug companies have been fined billions of dollars in recent years, yet they still can’t clean up their act. Unfortunately, Pfizer looks at the $785 million fine as a small cost of doing business instead of a deterrent.”...

In yet another antidumping U.S. False Claims Act lawsuit where a company throws its dishonest competitor under the bus, electrode manufacturer, Graphite Electrode Sales Inc. filed a qui tam claim against rival Ameri-Source for allegedly scheming to avoid paying import duties on its Chinese-made graphite electrodes.

Ameri-Source agreed to pay $3 million to resolve the allegations and Graphite Electrode Sales was granted a $480K reward for filing the whistleblower claim that exposed the fraudulent acts.

Whistleblower Graphite Electrode Alleges Customs Duty Evasion via Misrepresentation

Graphite Electrode became suspicious of Ameri-Source when it learned that, between December of 2009 and March of 2012, the Pennsylvania-based rival company allegedly evaded duties on 15 shipments of small-diameter graphite electrodes from China by knowingly misrepresenting that they were duty free large-diameter electrodes. Graphite Electrode filed a whistleblower lawsuit under the qui tam provision of the FCA in 2013 and the U.S. government opted to intervene (took over prosecution of the whistleblower case) in February 2016....

51 hospitals in 15 states have agreed to pay the Federal Government $23 million to resolve False Claims Act allegations by two whistleblowers, regarding the implantation of cardiac devices in Medicare patients without adhering to Medicare's coverage requirements.

This is the last resolution in a series of lawsuits that began a nationwide investigation into Medicare billings for unnecessary cardiac implants. Last October, nearly 457 hospitals in 47 states reached 70 settlements totaling a recovery of $250 million. At that time, whistleblowers Leatrice Ford Richards, a cardiac nurse, and Thomas Schuhmann, a healthcare reimbursement consultant, received a reward of $38 million.

ICD Medicare Coverage Rules Ignored Per Leatrice Richards & Thomas Schuhmann Whistleblowers

Richards and Schuhmann filed the lawsuit after observing irregularities in the way hospitals established who was a suitable candidate for the implantation of a cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) covered by Medicare. Each ICD costs the Federal healthcare program $25,000. ICDs perform the same function as common handheld defibrillators, working to restore the heart's normal rhythm. The ICD detects abnormal cardiac rhythms and rapidly corrects them, by way of a delivering a shock to the heart....

In a message that precedes the Annual Report to Congress from the IRS’s Whistleblower Program, its Director Lee D. Martin addressed several key issues, most notably, the need to reduce the lifecycle of whistleblower claims. While praising the results of the program in terms of tax collections, the Director saw fit to address a problem many whistleblowers have encountered when reporting unlawful conduct by US taxpayers.
According to the report, Fiscal Year 2015 was a “big...