States of Pay: Emerging Trends in State Whistleblower Bounty Schemes
28 Pages Posted: 26 Jan 2013
Date Written: 2012
Abstract
This contribution to the "Citizen Employees" symposium held in 2012 discusses the rapid adoption of state false claims acts, modeled on the federal FCA, over the past half-decade. Congress, in the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, created an unusual "carrot" for states to adopt whistleblower reward and protection provisions -- states with laws that were as strong as the federal version would get a larger share of any Medicaid funds recovered through FCA litigation. In Bucy et al.'s 2009 study, 24 jurisdictions had enacted state false claims laws, up from 19 in 2004. The author found that, by 2012, 40 states had adopted false claims laws. The paper provides a typology of those laws, and argues that the DRA's unusual incentive for law reform may end up being among the most significant changes in whistleblower law in recent decades.
Keywords: whistleblowers, qui tam, false claims, health care fraud
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