The Massachusetts Superior Court recently held that a qui tam relator’s analysis of publicly available information was subject to the public disclosure bar and that, no matter how involved or expert that analysis was, the relator was not the original source of the information alleged in the complaint.  Thus, in Commonwealth ex rel. Johan Rosenberg v. JPMorgan Chase & Co., et al., SUCV2014-03323, Judge Kaplan, sitting in the Business Litigation Session, dismissed the complaint.  This…

Last week the Department of Justice announced that American Airlines will pay over $22 million to settle claims that it falsely reported delivery times for mail it delivered on behalf of the United States Postal Service. Under a contract between USPS and American, the airline was responsible for picking up U.S. mail from various receptacles in the United States and in U.S. government offices abroad, and delivering that mail to domestic and international locations. Among…

Late last month the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut issued a press release regarding the latest False Claims Act (FCA) settlement involving the healthcare industry in New England.  According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), Clinical Science Laboratory, Inc. (CSL) and its individual owners agreed to pay over $1.5 million to settle claims that they had violated federal and state FCA laws.  The government stated that Massachusetts-based CSL provided urine drug testing…

In September 2018, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) closed its Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Program (OVDP), which had, in various forms and at various times since 2009, provided a mechanism for taxpayers with undisclosed foreign accounts to come clean and avoid criminal liability.  While this was a noteworthy development and made the news given how hard the IRS had pushed in the recent past for compliance in this area, the reality is that IRS has long…

Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin and his Securities Division are increasingly turning their attention toward securities offerings in the cannabis industry, as demonstrated by the June 19, 2019 filing of the second enforcement action against a cannabis business in the last two months.  The filing was accompanied by a statement from Galvin warning of future sweeps in the industry. The latest enforcement action, brought against Positronic Farms, based in Holyoke, MA, and its founder…

The Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision authored by Justice Thomas, agreed with the Eleventh Circuit that the False Claims Act’s “government knowledge” statute of limitations applies regardless of whether the government chooses to intervene in a qui tam suit. Under the False Claims Act, a civil action must be filed by the later of 1) six years after the statutory violation, or  2) three years after the relevant facts are “known or reasonably…

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York recently criticized government agencies for outsourcing their investigation to the target company, Deutsche Bank, and its counsel, Paul Weiss, to such a degree that the court treated statements that an employee made to internal investigators as the product of government interrogation.  United States v. Connolly, No. 16 Cr. 0370 (CM), 2019 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 76233 (S.D.N.Y. May 2, 2019).   The investigation concerned potential manipulation…