The Department of Justice and Tuomey Healthcare have announced a $72.4 million settlement in a lawsuit that the DOJ touts as “another achievement for the [DOJ and DHS] Health Care Fraud Prevention and Enforcement Action Team (HEAT) initiative.” The settlement follows a 2013 trial in which a jury found Tuomey had violated the False Claims Act and Stark Law by filing more than 21,000 false...
In an unpublished decision issued on Thursday, August 13, 2015, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reemphasized Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 9(b)’s “stringent particularity requirement” when it affirmed a lower court’s dismissal of plaintiff’s FCA claim, finding “that the district court did not err in concluding that the amended complaint failed to plead fraud with the requisite specificity.” McLain v. KBR, Inc., No. 14-1816...
On July 2, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed a jury verdict of more than $237 million against Tuomey Healthcare System, a nonprofit hospital in South Carolina, based on Stark Law and False Claims Act violations. United States ex rel. Drakeford v. Tuomey Healthcare System, No. 13-2219 (4th Cir. July 2, 2015). The Government’s claims in the case were based on...
In an important decision regarding the False Claims Act’s much-litigated “public disclosure” bar, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit recently concluded that the disclosure of reports and audits to government officials, without further distribution to the public or dissemination in the “public domain,” does not implicate the FCA’s “public disclosure” provision. See United States ex rel. Wilson v. Graham Cnty. Soil...
