Federal DOJ Reward Program
The primary tool of the federal government to fight fraud is the False Claims Act or FCA for short. Often, fraud goes undetected unless a whistleblower steps forward. To encourage you to report fraud, the DOJ Reward Program generally pays rewards of between 15 and 25 percent of the funds the government recovers. The FCA is quite complex and contains many rules and requirements. A copy of the FCA statute is attached here. Each of these steps must be strictly followed or a reward cannot be paid. In fact, roughly 80 percent of applications get rejected. That is why it is so important to understand the requirements and to select experienced counsel.
In addition, there are some risks, including the fact that your name will be made public once the government is finished with its investigation and decides whether or not to accept your application. You can discuss the benefits and risks with your attorney in confidence before making a decision to apply for a reward.
Virtually everyone wants to get an idea of the amount of reward they may be able to collect if they do report fraud. Attached here is a formal guideline prepared by the Department of Justice for the factors it uses when trying to determine what level of a reward you should be paid. It should be pretty obvious that this process is very subjective and your attorney will need to be an effective advocate to negotiate a fair reward. The biggest factor in estimating a reward, however, is the amount of funds DOJ might recover back from the wrongdoer. Because the reward is a percentage of the funds collected, your reward will be small if the recovery is small, and large if the recovery is large. For instance, if you can only show that a company cheated by $200,000 and you received an average reward of 18%, the total reward would be $36,000. This figure is before you give your attorney his share and pay taxes. That is one reason why I only take cases where I believe that the government will collect $5 million.
Click here to view the 20 largest False Claims Act cases.
Click here for general information and statistics.
Click here to view statistics published by the Deparment of Justice for fiscal year 2007.
If you want to ask me to review your case, go to the section "Do I have a case".