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Does the Volume of Qui Tam FCA Enforcement Mean the System Is Working, or Prove That the ‘Rogues’ Have Gone Rogue?
The False Claims Act (FCA), enacted during the Civil War to combat widespread fraud by Union Army suppliers, prohibits knowingly submitting “false claims” for payment to the government. FCA claims can be initiated by the government or private citizens — qui tam relators — on the government’s behalf, based on new, non-public information. The government can intervene in the case, or allow relators to proceed alone; in successful suits, FCA provides for triple damages and per-claim penalties, and successful relators receive a share of the recovery. That financial incentive is key: as one sponsor of the original FCA explained, the government was “holding out a temptation and setting a rogue to catch a rogue, which is the safest and most expeditious way I have ever discovered of bringing rogues to justice.”
Justice Department statistics reflect the expansion of modern qui tam FCA enforcement. Between 1987 and 2024, the government recovered $78 billion in FCA settlements and judgments, including $55 billion in qui tam suits. The proliferation of qui tam suits has escalated; in 1987, qui tam recoveries were outnumbered 10-to-1 by those in government-initiated suits, but since 1995, qui tam actions account for an increasingly large majority of recoveries. In 2024 alone, recoveries in FCA qui tam suits exceeded $2.4 billion.
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