On an episode of the hit TV show The Wire, the informant named Bubbles is paid for information about a drug dealer. One of the newer police officers asked the officer paying Bubbles why he would waste good money on such a lowlife drug addict. The response was something along the lines of, “His information is hundreds of times more valuable than what I paid him. We can’t be everywhere. You need to learn to separate the information from the person providing it.”
The government has the ability under the False Claims Act to bring actions on their own without a qui tam relator or whistleblower. Like the detective in the Wire said, however, they can’t be everywhere. The government relies on whistleblowers to bring them information about wrongdoing. Since 1987, the Department of Justice has recovered $38.9 billion in fraud settlements and verdicts. A staggering 70 percent of those recoveries were born of or brought by whistleblowers. For some reason, though, whistleblowers are now under attack. Thursday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal contains an article about Dr. William LaCorte titled “How a Louisiana Doctor Got Rich as a 'Serial Whistleblower'.” Dr. LaCorte has received around $38 million as a result of his bringing successful qui tam lawsuits. He has helped uncover over $1 billion in fraud against the government by companies that are no strangers to fraud. However, the article suggests Dr. LaCorte is an opportunistic leech who conducts legal shakedowns of otherwise innocent companies. The article is more fodder from the special interest/big business lobby, which is trying hard to shift focus away from companies that defraud the government and place blame on the whistleblowers. This is not a new strategy but it does hit upon a sensitivity within false claims cases, namely how much money whistleblowers get in such cases.
Shortly after I left the government to work as a private lawyer on qui tam cases, some of my friends and colleagues likened my clients to snitches or tattletales. When they learned how much a successful whistleblower could recover, they scoffed. I understand how uninformed outsiders might see things, but whistleblowers are, by and large, courageous people who are more focused on stopping harmful and fraudulent conduct than making money. Most of the time they are not reporting things that happened to them personally, but things that they witnessed that were defrauding the government and often hurting patients. In most cases, whistleblowers reported the conduct to their company and were retaliated against.
There is, of course, the argument that some people are reaping windfalls for conduct that they themselves may have been a part of. To combat this, the courts and Department of Justice have effective tools at their disposal to reduce the amount of money a relator or whistleblower receives in any given case. Among the numerous items the DOJ considers in determining the realtor share are whether the relator participated in the fraud, delayed reporting the fraud, violated the seal provisions, or failed to assist the government in the investigation. At the end of the day the information they bring to light is much more valuable than what they receive and attempts by big business to make them out to be greedy vampires are misplaced and illogical.
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