In a brief farewell message from the Biden Administration, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) reported more than $2.9 billion in federal False Claims Act (FCA) settlements and judgments during fiscal year 2024—with whistleblowers filing the highest number of lawsuits in a single year in history. The total amount of recoveries represents a sizable jump from fiscal year 2023, for which DOJ reported it recovered nearly $2.7 billion, and from the recent dip in fiscal year 2022, when $2.2 billion was reported recovered.
DOJ releases its FCA statistics each year to provide an accounting of its False Claims Act and insight into enforcement trends and new and expected areas of focus. The FCA serves as one of the government's most powerful civil enforcement tools, as it contains strong penalty provisions aimed at deterring fraudulent conduct, and powerful monetary incentives for private individuals—called relators in the FCA lexicon—to bring cases alleging fraud against the government.
While DOJ generally also includes future enforcement priorities and areas of anticipated focus as part of its comprehensive look back at the Civil Division's FCA activity in the preceding fiscal year, it did not do so this year—likely because DOJ, as organized under former Attorney General Merrick Garland, is shifting from enforcement priorities associated with the outgoing Biden Administration to the agenda championed by new President Donald Trump. Indeed, by releasing its fiscal year 2024 statistics in mid-January 2025, about a month earlier than usual, DOJ was able to tout its settlements and judgments during the last week of the Biden Administration, prior to the transition to the new administration.
Qui Tam Cases: By The Numbers
The qui tam provisions of the FCA authorize allow individuals to file suit on behalf of the United States alleging fraud or false claims impacting government funds, and to receive a share of any resulting financial settlement or judgment. This year's statistics underscore the vital role whistleblowers play in FCA enforcement:
- In fiscal year 2024, whistleblowers filed 979 unique qui tam lawsuits—averaging 18 new cases filed every week and breaking the previous record set in 2013. In fiscal year 2023, 712 cases were initiated by whistleblowers—evidencing a leap of more than 250 filed cases from fiscal year 2023 to 2024. Because qui tam cases are initially filed under seal, and often take significant time for the government to investigate, it may be years before many of these cases become public and/or reach resolution.
- DOJ reported settlements and judgments exceeding $2.4 billion from qui tam suits resolved in fiscal year 2024—meaning that qui tam lawsuits accounted for nearly 83 percent of all federal recoveries in fiscal year 2024.
- Under the current FCA, revised in the 1980s to reign in fraud in the defense industry, whistleblowers are strongly incentivized to expose fraud and false claims because the Act's qui tam provisions allow them to share in government recoveries, ranging from 15 to 30 percent of the total amount recovered based on the whistleblower's allegations. In fiscal year 2024, whistleblowers' recoveries exceeded $400 million, an increase from total relator share payments of about $349 million in fiscal year 2023.
Notably, when DOJ announced its fiscal year 2023 statistics, it focused on its commitment to investigating and bringing cases itself, highlighting that its self-initiated enforcement actions jumped 1.5 times over the previous fiscal year. In its fiscal year 2024 press release, DOJ did not call attention to the number of self-initiated actions in comparison to whistleblower-initiated qui tam lawsuits.
Fiscal Year 2024 Enforcement Priorities
Consistent with years past, DOJ focused its enforcement activity in fiscal year 2024 on its traditional area of healthcare fraud—but also emphasized its pursuit of cases pertaining to pandemic-related fraud and cybersecurity threats.
Fraud in the healthcare industry was the top area of FCA settlements and judgments in fiscal year 2024, totaling more than $1.67 billion in cases focused on managed care providers, hospitals, other medical facilities, pharmacies, laboratories and physicians. Of the total 979 qui tam lawsuits filed in fiscal year 2024, 370 of those actions alleged fraud and/or false claims in the healthcare industry.
While the overall recovery amount certainly remains significant, health care fraud matters in fiscal year 2024 totaled only 58 percent of all recoveries. That's a substantial decrease from FY2023, where health care fraud cases amounted to 67 percent of total recoveries, and from FY2022, where health care fraud totaled 80 percent of the DOJ's FCA recoveries.
In recent years, DOJ has promised to use the FCA to recover funds lost to pandemic-relief fraud and to focus FCA enforcement efforts on ensuring contractor and grantee cybersecurity compliance. In fiscal year 2024, DOJ reported that it obtained more than 250 FCA settlements and judgments, which collectively exceeded more than $250 million, in resolving allegations of pandemic-related fraud. Such actions included resolving allegations that companies submitted false claims for Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan forgiveness or submitted false claims for COVID-19 testing to a Health Resources and Services program for uninsured patients before confirming that the individuals had private health insurance coverage.
Although DOJ did not provide complete recovery amounts relating to its efforts to combat cybersecurity threats, the outgoing Biden Administration highlighted several actions undertaken by DOJ's Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative, which aims to use the FCA to promote cybersecurity compliance. Since launching the Initiative in 2021, DOJ has gradually ramped up its efforts to hold government contracts and other recipients of federal funding accountable for violating cybersecurity requirements, thereby ostensibly placing government data and security systems at risk.
The report noted that the Justice Department filed claims against the Georgia Institute of Technology and Georgia Tech Research Corp. in an ongoing case alleging that those defendants failed to meet cybersecurity requirements in connection with Department of Defense contracts. The government also documented settlements with several companies that failed to meet cybersecurity requirements listed in state and federal government contracts.
Anticipated Priorities In A Second Trump Administration
The fiscal year 2024 statistics report unveiled last week did not forecast any future predictions, but we expect that health care False Claims Act settlements and judgments will continue to lead the way. Although we cannot be sure if Trump's Department of Justice will be as aggressive in bringing government-initiated FCA cases, qui tam cases brought by whistleblowers will likely remain the largest percentage of FCA settlements and recoveries.
While not mentioned in DOJ's annual report, the constitutionality of the FCA's qui tam provisions is an issue to follow in the coming year, as the ramifications of a case, Zafirov v. Florida Medical Associates percolating through the federal appellate process could lead to a sea change in FCA enforcement. In September 2024, a Trump-appointed judge in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida determined that the qui tam provisions of the FCA are unconstitutional. The court in Zafirov, in a standalone decision, reasoned that the qui tam provisions violate the Appointments Clause of Article II of the U.S. Constitution.
The federal government has called on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the constitutionality of the FCA's whistleblower provisions, asserting in an appellate brief filed on January 6, 2024 that the Florida district court's ruling is an outlier that goes against decades of U.S. Supreme Court precedent. The decision is indeed the first of its kind, and appears to clash with recent Supreme Court cases authored by conservative justices that reinforce the qui tam provision's place as an entrenched civil enforcement mechanism. That said, in U.S. ex rel. Polansky v. Executive Health Resources, Inc., 599 U.S. 419 (2023), Justice Clarence Thomas's dissent noted "substantial arguments that the qui tam device is inconsistent with Article II and that private relators may not represent the interests of the United States in litigation."
Although unlikely, given the FCA's long history of bipartisan support, Civil and Appellate Division attorneys involved in appealing the decision could change tack under the new Trump Administration's DOJ leadership. If the qui tam provision is eventually voided—a long way away from actually happening—it remains to be seen how the government would pivot to enforce the FCA without relying on whistleblower actions.
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