On October 24, 2012 the Unites States of America filed a lawsuit against the Bank of America Corporation for selling toxic mortgages to Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac which cost the taxpayers more than $1 billion dollars. The lawsuit sought penalties under two laws; the False Claims Act, which is normally used to target fraud against the government, and the 1989 FIRREA Law. FIRREA does not usually hold up in court, but the government is once again relying on it because of the financial crisis as a possibility for targeting civil fraud concerning financial institutions. (Viswanatha, Aruna, 2013) (Stempel, Jonathan, 2012) On May 8, 2013, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff issued a two-page ruling that dismissed the claims in the lawsuit seeking penalties under the False Claims Act, but allowed the claims that sought penalties under Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act (FIRREA) to advance. The relevance of the False Claims Act and the FIRREA Law will be further explored in this case. (Viswanatha, Aruna, 2013) The False Claims Act The False Claims Act, also known as the "Lincoln Law" is an American federal law that holds persons and companies accountable for abusing governmental programs. However, the law includes a "qui tam" provision that allows people without government ties to file actions on behalf of the government. This is also referred to as “whistleblowing”. The Act prohibits such measures as knowingly presenting false claims for payment or approval,
n Baltimore, Maryland theSt. Agnes Healthcarehad False Claims Act alleging that they submitted false claims to Medicare by billing for evaluation and management services at a higher reimbursement rate than the Federal healthcare programs allowed. They agreed to pay the United States $122,928 to resolve the claims under the False Claims Act. In June 2011, St. Agnes acquired a medical practice consisting of twelve cardiologists who were formerly members of MidAtlantic Cardiovascular Associates. The twelve cardiologists became employees of St. Agnes and continued to provide services to their patients through Maryland Cardiovascular Specialists, a specialty practice affiliated with St. Agnes. Medicare permits a higher rateof reimbursement
From year-end 2004 through the first-quarter 2008, defendant Brian Fox misled the investing public by fraudulently inflating the revenue and assets and fraudulently omitting major liabilities, of Powder River Petroleum International, Inc. (“Powder River” or the “company”) in the company’s Commission filings, and by making other false and misleading public disclosures. From year-end 2004, Powder River conveyed working interests in oil and gas leases to investors in Asia for over $43 million. Because Powder River promised full repayment of the working interest
Plaintiffs’ Memorandum of Points and Authorities in Support of Complaint for Charge of Accessory after the fact in the crime of Credit Card Fraud
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX), also known as the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act and the Auditing Accountability and Responsibility Act, was signed into law on July 30, 2002, by President George W. Bush as a direct response to the corporate financial scandals of Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco International (Arens & Elders, 2006; King & Case, 2014;Rezaee & Crumbley, 2007). Fraudulent financial activities and substantial audit failures like those of Arthur Andersen and Ernst and Young had destroyed public trust and investor confidence in the accounting profession. The debilitating consequences of these perpetrators and their crimes summoned a massive effort by the government and the accounting profession to fight all forms of corruption through regulatory, legal, auditing, and accounting changes.
§1328-7b(b), the Federal False Claims Act, as well as various other federal and state laws and regulations.
This act permits private individual to sue those a person who confer extortion against government programs.
Mortgage fraud is one of the costliest, yet seldom prosecuted crimes in the criminal world. CoreLogic estimates approximately $13 billion in fraud losses occurred in 2012, according to the latest available data in the 2012 Mortgage Fraud Trends Report (Gerding, 2013). While these numbers may seem high, the approximate $13 billion in losses is only a fraction of what it would be if every case were to be prosecuted. Mortgage fraud was also a major contributing factor towards a national, and nearly global economic collapse in 2008 when the United States economy saw the worst recession it has seen since the great depression. Anyone that has seen the films “99 homes” starring Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon or “The Big Short” starring Christian Bale and Ryan Gosling has seen a largely realistic glimpse of mortgage fraud and how devastating it can be.
In this case, there are several conspirators who is involved in the fraud receiving punishment from either SEC or federal government. Robert Levin, the AMRE executive and major stockholder, and Dennie D.Brown, the company’s chief accounting officer, were subject to the punishment in the form of a huge amount of fine by the SEC and the federal government. This punishment came from reasons. After AMRE going public, the company have the obligation to publish its financial reports but its performance did not meet expectation. The investigation by SEC shows that Robert took the first step of this scam, fearing the sharp drop of AMRE’s stock price because of the poor performance of company. He abetted Brown, to practice three main schemes to present a false appearance of profitable and pleasant financial reports. Firstly, they instructed Walter W.Richardson, the company’s vice president of data processing, to enter fictitious unset leads in the lead bank and they originally deferred the advertising cost mutiplying “cost per lead” and “unset leads” amount, so that they deferred a portion of its advertising costs in an asset account. The capitalizing of advertising expenses allowed them to inflate the net income for the first quarter of fiscal 1988. Secondly, at the end of the third and fourth quarters of fiscal 1988, they added fictitious inventory to AMRE’s ending inventory records, and prepared bogus inventory count sheets for the auditors. Thirdly, they overstated the percentage
 Making false or misleading statements with the purpose of securing goods or services under the Workers' Compensation Act;
The Federal Tort Claims Act is a limited waiver of the federal government’s sovereign immunity when its employees are negligent within the scope of their employment. Typically the government cannot be sued whenever they have committed a tort or any of their employees have committed a tort, making the government basically immune from being sued. The only time they can be sued is when the government says they can be sued. Luckily for victims of torts, the government created the Federal Tort Claim Act which allows the victims of torts to sue the government for negligence of their employees. There are certain limitations and criteria that must be followed.
The reason for this according to the author Bailey, Zuckerman, & Pierce (1989) states that intended primarily for polygraph and private employers, this guide to compliance with the Employee Polygraph Protection Act of 1988 (EPPA) summarizes the act and provides a checklist for compliance. The compliance guide is going to have a list of checkpoints in order to demonstrate a polygraph test on an individual. Paige would have been presented with proper notification of these test to determine if she was stealing from the company. Paige still has the option of not following through with this test. If Paige was to start the test; however starts to feel uncomfortable. Paige has the option of canceling the test. Paige also has the option of having this
Healthcare finances does not come without legal and regulatory issues. Issues in healthcare finances are false claims and whistleblower suits. The False Claims Act is a federal law that cover fraud in any federal funded program such as Medicare and Medicaid. This act covers knowing or conspiring to falsify any claim for payment by the federal government. In 2010 alone the government recovered over $7 billion in false claims, healthcare and pharmaceuticals made up 75% of total payment. And since then more than $130 million of claims has been settled.
Since the housing market bust, there has been an explosion in the number of federal investigation of mortgage fraud scheme across the country. Mortgage Fraud is a violation of state and
Although Congress has used several anti-fraud measures to protect the federal government health care programs, the False Claims Act of 1986 has become the main weapon that government prosecutors use against perpetrators of health care fraud. Designed to prevent fraud and other abuses in federal government programs, the False Claims Act has been the primary statute the government has used in its fight against health care fraud. However, government prosecutors do not rely on one statute in their prosecution of alleged cases of health care fraud. Instead, they rely on a combination of statutes, but the False Claims Act has emerged as the main statutory weapon.
On April 21, 2001, Lee Farkas, the former chairman of a private mortgage lending company, Taylor, Bean, & Whitaker (TBW), was convicted for his role in a more than $2.9 billion fraud scheme (Schoenberg, 2011). This action contributed to the failures of Colonial Bank, one of the 25 largest banks in the United States, and TBW, one of the largest privately held mortgage lending companies in the United States. According to court documents and evidence presented at the trial, Farkas and his co-conspirators engaged in a scheme that misappropriated more than $1.4 billion from Colonial Bank’s Mortgage Warehouse Lending division and