White Collar Crime Prof Blog

IRS Whistleblower Birkenfeld Hits The Jackpot

Reuters reports here on the astounding award. Yours truly and other luminaries are quoted.

(wisenberg)

Dodd-Frank FCPA Whistleblowers: The Coming Wave

Take the FCPA, add in expansive new whistleblower protections, start employing the willful blindness doctrine with abandon, and presto! You've got a real growth industry on your hands.

The new whistleblower provisions in the Dodd-Frank Act should significantly increase federal civil and criminal fraud enforcement actions in the coming years. Whistleblowers will now be able to reap potentially huge monetary rewards for the timely reporting of corporate fraud to the SEC and CFTC, if recoveries of over a million dollars are made by those entities, the DOJ, or other regulators. Under Dodd-Frank, the pool of qualified whistleblowers has been enlarged and there is no requirement that whistleblowers file qui tam actions in order to be compensated for their information.

Expect to see exponential growth in the already burgeoning area of FCPA enforcement, fueled by new whistleblower activity. Recall that the FCPA is a creature of the securities fraud statutes, and is therefore within the SEC's purview. 

All of this and more is detailed in my friend Michael E. Clark's excellent new article in the September issue of ABA Health eSource, Publicly Traded Health Care Entities at Risk from New SEC Whistleblower Incentives and Protections in Dodd-Frank Act. Clark is with Duane Morris's Houston office. As with all ABA publications, Mike's article may not be copied or disseminated, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, or downloaded or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system, without the express written consent of the American Bar Association.

(slw)

Settlement in Merck Drug Case

A press release of the DOJ reports that "Merck & Company has agreed to pay more than $650 million to resolve allegations that the pharmaceutical manufacturer failed to pay proper rebates to Medicaid and other government health care programs and paid illegal remuneration to health care providers to induce them to prescribe the company’s products..." "The allegations were brought in two separate lawsuits filed by whistleblowers under the qui tam, or whistleblower, provisions of the False Claims Act."

(esp)