Did you know that the government has paid whistleblower rewards of over $150 million per person? You might even be more surprised to find out that it’s one of the few federal government programs that not only works, but actually earns money. For every dollar in a whistle-blower reward the government pays, it recovers 13 dollars from a company accused of defrauding a government program.
I have compiled a listing of the top 25 largest whistleblower rewards paid to ordinary citizens for reporting fraud against the government. The list of large whistleblower rewards paid to keeps growing and growing big. By 2015, the 25 biggest whistleblower rewards paid by the government amounted to $50 million each. Translated that amounts to: $50,000,000.00. That’s a lot of zeros! The rewards were justified because in those cases the companies each agreed to repay at least $325 million for allegedly defrauding the government.
And by 2015, the top 10 largest whistleblower rewards amounted to about $100 million. In those cases, the government got the better of the bargain because for each reward of that magnitude it means that a company repaid at least $650 million that it allegedly was not entitled to bill in the first place. But that’s not all. Hold on to your hat. The 5 largest whistleblower rewards amounted to a whopping $150 million or more for reporting fraud against the government. That’s right. At least five times so far the government has happily paid mega-lottery type reward amounts to entice whistleblowers to step forward to report massive fraud. Here’s the good news. In those top five cases, the government was able to recover $2 billion, $1.85 billion, $1.72 billion, $1 billion, and $900 million. In other words, if these $150 million rewards were not offered, the government would not have recovered any of the $7.47 billion from these 5 cases brought by whistleblowers.
Because 10 percent of all government spending is lost to fraud, the government is losing hundreds of billions of dollars each year to greedy companies that think of government programs as their own private piggy banks. Because the government is not very good at catching fraud, it wisely enacted a whistleblower reward program that pays ordinary citizens between 15% and 25% of the amount it recovers back from companies cheating the government. Do the math. If a pharmaceutical drug company cheats by $1 billion by overcharging Medicare or Medicaid for a name brand drug, the reward to a whistleblower is a minimum of 15% or $150 million. That’s a lot of reasons to step forward by blowing the whistle on fraud against the government.
In my fifteen years at the U.S. Department of Justice in its whistleblower reward office, I worked on some of these large fraud or False Claims Act cases paying big rewards. I know first-hand that paying rewards works. The reward program is open to anyone who knows of fraud against any government program. The ways companies cheat or defraud the government are limited only by the imagination. Our website outlines the more common Medicare and military/contractor fraud schemes in which rewards are available.
It’s not just about getting a reward. Whistleblowing is the right thing to do. Let’s put an end to mindset of companies thinking that cheating the government is an acceptable business practice. After spending 15 years prosecuting fraud for the federal government – and helping recover nearly $1.5 billion in the process – I decided to found my own law firm dedicated solely and exclusively to representing whistleblowers report fraud and apply for rewards.
Contact me to find out in complete confidence if you have the right type of fraud allegations that the government pays rewards. Just fill out my form and I will personally review it. Who knows, you or someone you know may make it in the list of the top 25 whistleblower rewards.