DOJ collected $3B under the False Claims Act last year

The U.S. Department of Justice obtained more than $3 billion in judgments and settlements under False Claims Act cases in the 2019 fiscal year, it announced Thursday.

The vast majority of this money, $2.6 billion, came from "matters related to the health care industry," according to a press release. More than half of that came from just one company, Reckitt Benckiser Group plc. In July, the DOJ announced the British conglomerate agreed to pay $1.4 billion to resolve civil and criminal claims related to prescriptions for Suboxone, its drug to treat opioid addiction.

Several other pharmaceutical companies agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in total to settle claims involving kickbacks, false marketing and other acts designed to increase prescriptions for particular drugs.

The bulk of the rest of the money came from claims involving procurement fraud, often involving the military. For instance, five South Korean companies agreed to pay a total of $162 million because of anticompetitive fuel contracts for U.S. bases. Other large military claims involved contracts to deliver aluminum products and battlefield communications systems. The release also said the federal government has collected more than $62 billion since 1986. That was the year Congress substantially strengthened the act by allowing the government to share money with whistleblowers who file qui tam claims. The DOJ said $2.1 billion was collected through such claims this year, though some of that money involved claims from prior years, with $265 million of it paid to people who filed the claims. Whistleblowers filed 633 such cases during the latest fiscal year.

-- Malcolm Maclachlan