Archive for the ‘Whistle-blowers’ Category
 Saturday, September 13th
QuestionGirl September 13th, 2008 - 10:31 am
Senior Justice Department officials blocked the U.S. attorney in Colorado from supporting a whistleblower’s suit last year, jeopardizing the government’s prospects for recovering as much as $40 million from a major oil company for its alleged underpayment of royalties.
U.S. Attorney Troy Eid said Washington overruled his request to enter the case against the Kerr-McGee Corp. A lawyer for the whistleblower said he was told that decision was made “at the highest levels” of the Justice Department, then run by former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
“I recommended strongly that we intervene,” Eid said. “My view did not prevail.”
Moreover, McClatchy found that the Justice Department has participated in only a handful of the 80 whistleblower cases brought against the oil industry since 1995.
Whistleblower suits are generally less successful without the Justice Department’s intervention, and if a whistleblower prevails on his own, taxpayers get a smaller share of the damages.
More at McClatchy
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Wednesday, July 2nd
Buck July 2nd, 2008 - 10:32 am
After all, they didn’t start the Afghani or Iraqi wars, did they? They diligently fight tooth and nail the rising costs of health-care. Lord knows they’d all stroke out if one more governmental function becomes privatized.
An atmosphere of bamboozlement and deceit. Nope, that’s not republican territory at all.
A Backlog Of Cases Alleging Fraud
Whistle-Blower Suits Languish at Justice
More than 900 cases alleging that government contractors and drugmakers have defrauded taxpayers out of billions of dollars are languishing in a backlog that has built up over the past decade because the Justice Department cannot keep pace with the surge in charges brought by whistle-blowers, according to lawyers involved in the disputes.
The issue is drawing renewed interest among lawmakers and nonprofit groups because many of the cases involve the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, rising health-care payouts, and privatization of government functions — all of which offer rich new opportunities to swindle taxpayers.
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Friday, February 22nd
QuestionGirl February 22nd, 2008 - 11:35 am
INN World Report does a report on Sibel Edmonds story.
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Friday, February 8th
QuestionGirl February 8th, 2008 - 11:24 am
Gee, maybe this will encourage more pharmaceutical reps to be whistleblowers. We can only hope………
Merck agreed yesterday to pay more than $650 million to settle charges that it routinely overbilled the government for its most popular medicines, the arthritis drug Vioxx and the cholesterol drug Zocor, cheating Medicaid out of millions of dollars in discounts over eight years.
They agreed! ha! Gee thanks……
And a true thank you to H. Dean Steinke, the whistelblower.
The Merck settlement culminates an investigation that began in 2000 and is one of the first in a series of cases centering on whether drugmakers used unfair pricing practices to bilk the government. The Justice Department is looking into 630 health-care whistleblower claims.
H. Dean Steinke, a district sales manager for Merck, set off the investigation after he noticed his company was using questionable sales tactics. Steinke complained to his supervisors, who brushed him off, so he turned to federal authorities.
Steinke, a 51-year-old Michigan native, will receive about $68 million from the settlement as a whistleblower reward. He said he was prompted to go to authorities after his direct supervisor told him: “I don’t care how you do it, but get the damn business,” when he questioned the sales practices. “There comes a time when you just dig in your heels and say, ‘You know what? They’re not going to get away with it,’ ” Steinke said.
Full article at the Washington Post
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Friday, November 2nd
QuestionGirl November 2nd, 2007 - 3:02 pm
Vanity Fair has a good article about Alan Grayson, an Orlando attorney who specializes in handling whistleblower cases and specifically cases against contractor fraud in Iraq, namely the Halliburton shootoff, KBR. He’s been working on whistleblower cases for 16 years. According to him, the fraud in Iraq is the “crime of the century.” I’d like to say there’s nothing new in the article, but for me there was. The overwhelming corruption that runs through our government is sickening. And what’s even more sickening is we not only have a justice department who refuses to prosecute these cases, we still have a congress who does nothing about it. Hearings hearings hearings and the contracts go on unchecked. The justice department either doesn’t prosecute, or they keep cases under seal so the extent of fraud isn’t truly known. Unfortunately, I don’t think you’re able to read it online. Some exerpts from the article:
Former attorney general Alberto Gonzales has long’standing links with both Halliurton and its legal counsel, the veneralble Texas fir of Vinson & Elkins. All the qui tam suits Grayson has filed against Halliburton and KBR have been defended by attorneys from V&E. In 1982, it was V&E that gave Gonzales his first job as a lawyer. Nine years later he became one of the firm’s first minority partners…..a prootion that his biographer Billl Minutaglio would single out as “the defining moment of his life.”
Grayson states, ” Cuulatively, the amount that’s been spent on contractors in the four plus years of the war is now over $100 billion. Pick any number between 10 percent and 50 percent….I dont’ think you can seriously argue that the scale of the fraud is less than 10 percent. Either way, you’re talking cumulatively about something between $10 and $50 billion.”
KBR’s current military’support contract is known as the Logistics civil Augmentation Program, or Logcap. This is the contract’s third inccarnation, and like its predecessors, LOGCAP3 is a “cost plus” contract: whatever KBR spends, the government agrees to reimburse, with the addition of a fee of about 3 percent. The more the company spends, the more it akes, so it pays to be profligate. LOGCAP is also an “indefinite-delivery, indefinite quantity” contract, which means that the Pentagon can go on commissioning whatever it wants from KBR whenever it wants. Instead of being subject to competitive bids, fresh items can be added to the contract at will: all officials have to do is issue a “task order.” These can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars—-even billions, in the case of Task Order 59, which put KBR in charge of supporting the 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.
Read more »
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Saturday, August 25th
Buck August 25th, 2007 - 9:58 am
Don’t believe we’re living in the age of massive corruption? Read the following and be prepared to gnash your teeth. Stuff guaranteed to angry up the blood!
Iraq corruption whistleblowers face penalties
 Robert Isakson, whistleblower Cases show fraud exposers have been vilified, fired, or detained for weeks
One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.
Or worse.
For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.
There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.
[...]
So Vance says he blew the whistle, supplying photos and documents and other intelligence to an FBI agent in his hometown of Chicago because he didn-t know whom to trust in Iraq.
For his trouble, he says, he got 97 days in Camp Cropper, an American military prison outside Baghdad that once held Saddam Hussein, and he was classified a security detainee.
Associated Press
Source: MSNBC.com
Robert Isakson filed a whistleblower suit against a contractor in 2004 alleging the company bilked the U.S. government out of tens of millions of dollars. A judge later threw out a $10-million ruling in his favor.
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Sunday, August 5th
QuestionGirl August 5th, 2007 - 7:27 pm
Whoever did this should be protected under the whistle-blower act. They did the country a favor by reporting this illegal act.
FBI agents searched the home of former Justice Department lawyer Thomas Tamm last week in an effort to determine who leaked details of the warrantless eavesdropping program to the news media, Newsweek magazine reported Sunday, citing two anonymous legal sources.
The agents, who had obtained a classified search warrant, took Tamm’s desktop computer, two laptops belonging to his children and some of Tamm’s personal files, said Newsweek, which granted anonymity to the two sources because they did not want to be identified talking about an open case.
Tamm left the department last year. He had worked in the department’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, a secretive unit that oversees surveillance of terrorist and espionage targets, according to Newsweek.
In December 2005, The New York Times published a story exposing the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program to eavesdrop on international phone calls and e-mails of U.S. residents without court warrants.
More at Boston.com
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Monday, May 14th
QuestionGirl May 14th, 2007 - 6:13 pm
From the Guardian:
WASHINGTON (AP) - Two FBI whistle-blowers Monday supported protection for intelligence agency employees who expose government wrongdoing.
The comments by Colleen Rowley and Michael German came as 40 public-interest organizations urged Congress to include national security workers in the Whistleblower Protection Act.
The act outlawing retaliation against whistle-blowers does not apply to employees of most intelligence agencies.
“Freedom to warn is a key concept,” Rowley said at a panel discussion on Capitol Hill.
Rowley’s blistering memo to the FBI director helped focus attention on the law enforcement agency’s shortcomings in the run-up to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
National security whistle-blowers often find themselves sidelined, without a security clearance and without a job, the American Civil Liberties Union said in a report.
Former FBI agent Michael German, a focus of one ACLU case study, reported serious problems in a counterterrorism investigation, a move he says prompted retaliation that led him to resign in protest.
German said his accusations ultimately were found to be true because of the persistence of Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who thanked German and Rowley for providing “valuable information to me in my efforts to oversee the FBI.”
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