Whistleblower Law Blog

TweetLast Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero approved a settlement in which Citigroup Inc., the nation’s third-largest bank, agreed to pay $158.3 million to settle claims that it defrauded the federal government by misleading the government into insuring high-risk home mortgages. The settlement  resolves a lawsuit against Citigroup brought by a whistleblower under the federal [...]

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TweetLast week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that the federal agencies succeeded in recovering $4.1 billion in fraudulent healthcare payments in 2011.  This figure – detailed in the annual Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control Program (HCFAC) report – is a record high, with recovered [...]

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TweetThe U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) last week cited a Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (Wal-Mart) supercenter in Rochester, NY for 24 repeated and serious violations of workplace safety and health standards. Following an OSHA inspection, OSHA proposed that Wal-Mart pay $365,500 in fines. The inspection conducted by OSHA’s Buffalo Area Office [...]

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TweetLast week the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) ordered Rowan Business Forms, a Salisbury, North Carolina-based commercial printing company, to reinstate and pay over $83,000 in back wages and compensatory damages to a former truck driver after OSHA found reasonable cause to believe that Rowan violated the whistleblower provision of [...]

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TweetKhaled Asadi, a former General Electric executive based in Iraq, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Houston, Texas, against General Electric (GE) on February 3, 2012, alleging that the company retaliated against him after he raised concerns about potential internal corruption. Asadi states in his complaint, that he was coerced to step down from [...]

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TweetOn January 31, 2012, investigators from the Office of Special Counsel reported that Air Force officials at the Dover military mortuary unlawfully punished four civilian workers who reported numerous incidents in which the mortuary mishandled deceased soldiers’ remains. The whistleblowers, who included mortuary inspectors and embalming and autopsy technicians, alleged that their supervisors retaliated against [...]

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TweetOn December 22, 2011, the Department of Labor’s Administrative Review Board (ARB) issued a 3-2 en banc decision that limits the application of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) outside of the United States. The case, Villanueva v. Core Laboratories, ARB No. 09-108, ALJ No. 2009-SOX-006 (ARB December 22, 2011), centered around a whistleblower complaint filed by [...]

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TweetR. Scott Oswald, managing principal of The Employment Law Group® law firm will serve as a panelist in an upcoming presentation to the Northern Virginia Chapter of the Federal Bar Association on March 7, 2012. The topic of the Continuing Legal Education (CLE) seminar is “Blowing the Whistle in 2012: New Developments in Qui Tam [...]

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TweetR. Scott Oswald, Managing Principal of the The Employment Law Group® law firm, was recently interviewed by Federal Times, a weekly newspaper focused on providing insight into issues affecting U.S. government managers and other decision makers. On January 25, 2012, six current and former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) employees filled a lawsuit in the [...]

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TweetFormer BP employee August Walter filed suit  in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana last week, alleging that the oil company violated the Louisiana Environmental Whistleblower Statute when it terminated Walter after he refused to alter data related to the progress of clean-up for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Walter, a [...]

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