Anne Hayes Hartman

Hartman has pursued claims for whistleblowers reporting fraud in numerous industries, including health care, defense contracting, natural resources, utilities and finance. In September 2020, a state court judge in Sacramento finalized a $116 million settlement regarding claims by her clients that major telecoms overcharged government customers by more than $100 million for years.

“That was a long time coming, but that’s very common in whistleblower cases,” said Hartman. Indeed, Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Judy Holzer Hersher called the litigation “an eight-year odyssey” in a Zoom hearing with the attorneys who achieved the deal. State of California ex rel. OntheGo Wireless LLC v. Cellco Partnership dba Verizon Wireless, 34-2012-00127517 (Sacramento Co. Super. Ct., filed July 5, 2012).

Hartman, who represented many of the intervening government entities and the whistleblower, said what was uncommon was that the party who discovered the overcharges was not a telecom insider but Jeffrey Smith, a man who founded and ran a telecommunications management and optimization service company called OntheGo Wireless LLC.

“In his work he saw, as a taxpayer, that the government was not getting its money’s worth,” Hartman said. Smith, who will receive around $40 million under the terms of the California False Claims Act, examined years of payments by government entities and realized the wireless carriers did not honor an agreement to conduct quarterly reviews to ensure subscribers received cost-effective plans. “He came to us, wanting to see what his options were.”

In the settlement, Verizon Wireless will pay $68.2 million and AT&T Mobility will pay $47.9 million. Earlier, defendants Sprint Corp. and T-Mobile USA agreed to pay $9.8 million. “We went up against four well-resourced defendants with a lot at stake,” Hartman said. “It was a complex case with some 300 California purchasing entities involved. A series of cooperative purchasing contracts multiplies the issues. And there were three different contract periods involved. It was a lot to take on.”

Last year, in another major whistleblower case, Cisco Systems agreed to pay $8.6 million to settle claims that it sold video surveillance technology with known security flaws to several state and federal agencies including the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service and the U.S. military. Hartman represented whistleblower James Glenn. United States of America ex rel. Glenn v. Cisco Systems Inc., 1:11-cv-00400 (W.D. N.Y., filed May 10, 2011).

“The claim was that the systems Cisco sold were subject to access by bad actors,” Hartman said. “When Mr. Glenn reported it, the company terminated him, even though they had an internal program designed to find problems.”

She said whistleblower work is especially satisfying. “It’s a complex, risky process, where the whistleblowers put their livelihoods on the line. I enjoy it and I find it really rewarding.”

— John Roemer