Today, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced a whistleblower award totaling approximately $1.25 million to a whistleblower who satisfied the CFTC’s whistleblower rules by raising the matter internally and then waiting at least 120 days to contact the CFTC after the employer took no meaningful remedial action. Statement of Christopher Ehrman, former Director of the CFTC’s Whistleblower Office and partner at Phillips & Cohen, an international whistleblower law firm: “This whistleblower did exactly as the program intended – reporting the wrongdoing internally, gi ..read more

Phillips & Cohen partner Jeffrey Dickstein was quoted in the Portland Press Herald about Phillips & Cohen’s whistleblower lawsuit against six healthcare providers that the Department of Justice joined. “The defendants were aware of these significant errors but chose not disclose the impact of the errors to the government despite their obligation to do so,” said Phillips & Cohen partner Jeffrey Dickstein.  “(Department of Defense) payments to the health care defendants were pursuant to an agreed-upon formula which was based on many factors, including patients’ previous dia ..read more

Phillips & Cohen partner Erika Kelton talked to Bloomberg Law’s Ben Penn about the Department of Justice’s new pilot whistleblower awards program and the possibility Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations appear to partly fall outside SEC’s authority. “This is a very significant corruption case, so you bet I am going to think about taking that to DOJ.” Read more about the Department of Justice’s new whistleblower pilot program, “New DOJ Whistleblower Rewards Policy Has Lawyers Gearing Up,” Bloomberg Law, March 13, 2024.   The post New DOJ Whistleblower Rewards Policy Has Lawyers Gea ..read more

Washington, DC—The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) today joined a newly unsealed whistleblower lawsuit filed by Phillips & Cohen LLP that alleges six health systems and medical centers, and the alliance they established, defrauded the Department of Defense out of hundreds of millions of dollars intended to provide health care to military retirees by retaining payments they knew the government paid in error.    The defendants are Johns Hopkins Medical Services Corporation, based in Maryland; Martin’s Point Health Care, based in Maine; St. Vincent’s Catholic Medical Centers of New ..read more

Phillips & Cohen partner Steve Hasegawa spoke to Bloomberg Law about the Planned Parenthood whistleblower Medicaid fraud lawsuit.   The Fifth Circuit could “thread a needle” and determine that Planned Parenthood wins here because there’s a difference between an attorney who engages in conduct and one who participates in a lawsuit in order to determine if that conduct is legal, said Stephen Hasegawa, who represents whistleblowers with Phillips & Cohen LLP. The lawsuit doesn’t change the conduct, it just determines whether the conduct is permissible, he said.  “I doubt the ..read more

Statement of Erika Kelton, an international whistleblower attorney and partner with Phillip & Cohen: “Today’s expected announcement that the Department of Justice (DOJ) will further incentivize whistleblowers to come forward to report fraud is an important development in the war against corporate crime and shows the DOJ recognizes the power of incentivizing those with inside knowledge to step forward. Like the SEC and CFTC, it is essential that any new DOJ incentive program provide a mandatory minimum award of no less than 10 percent given the professional and personal risks that whistlebl ..read more

Phillips & Cohen partner Erika Kelton talked to The Wall Street Journal about FinCEN’s anti-money laundering whistleblower program and the agency’s lack of enforcement resources. “FinCEN’s enforcement staff is only a fraction of [those at] agencies like the SEC and [the Commodity Futures Trading Commission], both of which have had great success,” said Erika Kelton, a partner at law firm Phillips & Cohen LLP. “Congress could help greatly by appropriating more funds for the FinCEN program,” she said. “If I was to prioritize the issues, I would rank the relative lack of resources over the ..read more

Washington, DC, January 22, 2024— Lawdragon has named five Phillips & Cohen partners –Peter Wilson Chatfield, Stephen Hasegawa, Erika Kelton, Colette Matzzie, and Sean McKessy —to its 2024 “500 Leading Lawyers in America” list. Whistleblower attorneys Chatfield, Hasegawa, Kelton, Matzzie, and McKessy have had significant success representing whistleblowers, winning large settlements, and securing significant rewards for their whistleblower clients. Mr. Chatfield has three decades of experience representing whistleblowers, including a qui tam case a ..read more

Phillips & Cohen partner Edward Arens spoke to Law 360 about necessary changes to the IRS Whistleblower Program. “The agency needs to communicate with whistleblowers on an ongoing basis about their cases after they come forward with information, attorneys told Law360.” The article reads, “Generally speaking, when the IRS gets a whistleblower claim, its communication with the whistleblower doesn’t go beyond an initial interview, according to Edward H. Arens of Phillips & Cohen LLP. Whistleblowers can get to the crux of many issues and save the agency a lot of time, he said. Increased co ..read more

Bloomberg Law reports on the False Claims Act litigation landscape in 2023, talking with Phillips & Cohen partner Colette Matzzie. The article reads: “An FCA defendant’s continued payments argument ‘has not been seen as a dispositive factor although it is relevant,’ said whistleblower attorney Colette G. Matzzie with Phillips & Cohen LLP. The Third Circuit’s opinion is ‘a good example of where the courts have settled post-Escobar in weighing factors on materiality and not treating government continued payment as dispositive,’ she told Bloomberg Law. Another decision that Matzzie h ..read more