Last month, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appeared before Congress to present and justify the Justice Department’s Fiscal Year 2018 proposed budget.
While the Deputy AG’s remarks covered a wide range of topics, one that stood out was the Department’s continued commitment to fighting fraud against Medicare and Medicaid. As the Deputy AG noted to Congress, “the three-year average return on investment on health care fraud funding for the Department [of Justice] and HHS is $5 to every $1 invested.”
If anything, the Justice Department’s projections are conservative, as other reports have suggested that the return on investment may be closer to 10 to 1, or perhaps even higher. Regardless of the specific ratio, it is encouraging to see the Department recognize that investing money and resources in fighting health care fraud is a good investment for the American people. It is also encouraging to see that the Department is putting its money where its mouth is, with a proposed increase in funding for health care fraud investigation and litigation of $24.9 million—for a total of $274.7 million.
While the Deputy AG’s remarks did not specifically mention the role that whistleblowers play in this process, recent numbers speak for themselves. As we’ve previously noted, more than half of the money recovered under the False Claims Act in fiscal year 2016 came from cases filed by whistleblowers, and the total amount recovered by the government last year under the False Claims Act was $4.7 billion.
To read Deputy AG Rosenstein’s full remarks, see the following article from the DOJ’s website here.
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