Investigations, Enforcement, & Compliance Alerts
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February 9, 2022
|14 min read
On February 1, 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) released its annual False Claims Act (“FCA”) recovery statistics and announced that it had obtained more than $5.6 billion in settlements and judgments in fiscal year 2021 from civil cases involving fraud and false claims against the government. This total—which was driven by record-breaking recoveries in the health care industry, a traditional leading area for FCA recoveries—is more than double the amount recovered in the previous fiscal year and marks the second-highest annual total ever, behind only the approximately $6.1 billion recovered in fiscal year 2014. The significant increase in 2021 recoveries reverses a downward trend in the totals obtained by the DOJ during the previous couple of years. A careful analysis of the statistics and announcements demonstrates that the FCA continues to be a powerful tool supporting one of the DOJ’s “top priorities”—combatting fraud in an ever-expanding array of industries doing business with the government—and reveals what to expect in FCA enforcement in the coming years, from both the government and whistleblowers.