DOJ Targeted Industries

In the late 1990s, concerns were raised in the healthcare industry that the United States Department of Justice was being overly aggressive with its use of the civil False Claims Act investigations and actions. In response, on June 3, 1998, then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder circulated a memorandum to his Justice Department colleagues, providing “guidance” on the proper use of the False Claims Act in civil healthcare matters. Holder recognized that the False Claims Act was one of the most powerful tools the Department of Justice had to protect the integrity of Medicare and other taxpayer-funded healthcare programs. Of particular note, Holder stressed that the False Claims Act should be reserved for egregious conduct of defrauding government healthcare programs.

Today, more than two decades later, the Holder memorandum remains a guiding document for the Department and, by extension, the qui tam community. In practice, this means that the Justice Department and Nolan Auerbach and White attorneys focus our efforts on healthcare fraud schemes that are specifically geared to illegally drain government healthcare dollars. Such schemes tend to be business-plan frauds, conjured up from the highest levels of certain sectors of some of the country’s largest healthcare providers. In turn, a long line of enforcement actions have involved diagnostic lab companies, pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers, followed by hospital systems and other national providers, all comprising the source of the largest recoveries in recent years.

For over a decade, Medicare fraud has comprised over 80% of False Claims Act recoveries. For nearly two decades, Nolan, Auerbach & White attorneys have exclusively represented qui tam whistleblowers in Medicare fraud cases.