Many states now house prisoners in privately run facilities. Last year, there were 27,920 federal prisoners in private prisons and an additional 16,500 immigration detainees held privately. These numbers don’t include the tens of thousands of state prisoners. All told, there are an estimated 130,000 inmates today under the control of private jailers. Those jails, […]
Lawyers As Whistleblowers – An Ethical Conundrum
[Updated June 2020] Lawyers have a duty to protect their clients. Under our legal system, even the worst and most depraved criminals are entitled to legal representation. Our Founding Fathers wisely decided that the right to counsel was so important, that it needed to be part of the constitution and protected for all time’s sake. […]
Employment Specialists of Maine Settles False Claims Suit
[Post updated through 2021] Employment Specialists of Maine, known locally as ESM, is a private community rehabilitation provider in Maine. It provides services for many Maine residents struggling with intellectual disabilities. The company relies heavily on funding from the federal Medicaid program as well as state tax dollars. Earlier this year ESM settled charges that […]
Seattle MD Faces Medicare Fraud Charges
A Seattle physician has been charged with Medicare fraud. Published reports claim Bruce Chen was falsely billing for visiting patients. While that may sound more like an oversight or paperwork error, the government says some of the patients allegedly seen by Chen were dead while at other times he wasn’t even in the United States. […]
Whistleblower Case Leads to Settlement, Class Action Suit
Five students have filed a class action lawsuit against for profit Globe University after an earlier whistleblower case resulted in a $395,000 judgment against the school. The students claim the university misleads prospective students and lies about job placement rates. Earlier this summer, a former dean of the school, Heidi Weber, won a $395,000 judgment after […]
Feds Take Ambulance Company Owners For A Ride – Health Care Fraud
Earlier this month, a federal judge in Philadelphia sentenced Aleksandr N. Zagorodny, 40, to 78 months in prison for a health care fraud scheme involving MedEx Ambulance, Inc. He was the former president of the business. His brother, Sergey Zagorodny, 36, was sentenced to 5 years in prison for his involvement in the health care […]
Generation W Whistleblowers See Themselves As Part of the Solution
Ed Note: The following article is reprinted here courtesy of whistlewatch.org. We are proud supporters of both “Generation W” whistleblowers (to quote the post) and whistlewatch.org, a 501(c)3 nonprofit whistleblower advocacy group. We are also proud of our efforts to help whistleblowers in false claims act and IRS whistleblower actions collect the maximum rewards possible. […]
Wisconsin Lawyer & Physician Sanctioned in Medicaid Fraud Case
A Wisconsin lawyer and physician have both been admonished for their actions in a Medicaid fraud case (whistleblower suit) pending in a Milwaukee federal court. The lawyer on the case, Rebecca Geitman, was ordered to pay attorneys fees of $26,000. Those sanctions and fee awards unfortunately threaten to overshadow the larger and important legal issues […]
FIRREA – An Overlooked Whistleblower Tool?
I chuckled this morning when reading the paper. The big financial news this week is the Department of Justice suit against Bank of America for the sale of residential mortgage backed securities. The article claims the plaintiff’s bar “is abuzz” over the government’s use of a little known law called the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery […]
Heads on Beds – Assisted Living Facility Whistleblowers Post
[Post Updated through 2019] Whistleblowers play a critical role in the fight against rising healthcare costs. The biggest area of fraud – one that costs the government billions of dollars in fraud annually – is the Medicare program. Because Medicare is subsidized with tax dollars, healthcare providers that bill for unnecessary or poor quality services […]