False Claims Act Playbook

On February 7, 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) released its annual False Claims Act (“FCA”) recovery statistics and announced that it had obtained more than $2.2 billion in settlements and judgments in fiscal year 2022 from civil cases involving fraud and false claims against the government.[1] The significant decrease in 2022 recoveries stands in stark contrast with DOJ’s near-record breaking fiscal year 2021 where it obtained more than $5.6 billion in settlements and judgments. That said, fiscal year 2022 marked the fourteenth straight year where recoveries exceeded $2 billion.

Historically, if the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) wanted to obtain monetary relief against a defendant for violations of the federal securities laws, it needed to sue that defendant in federal court.  However, when Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002, it gave the SEC the option of seeking such relief from its own administrative law judges, instead.