Companies receive government contracts for everything from building roads and erecting hospitals to producing weapons and providing healthcare. If a company is in this category, it faced allegations of violating the False Claims Act or related laws and was fined or reached a settlement.
Sources
Violation Tracker contains around 4,000 cases relating to government contracting and procurement, with over $55 billion in penalties. About two-thirds of these were brought by the U.S. Justice Department under the False Claims Act, a law dating back to the Civil War era that is widely used to punish fraud against federal agencies. A large portion of these cases involve healthcare providers accused of cheating the Medicare and Medicaid programs.
The remainder of the cases originated with state and local prosecutors and regulators. Most of these are brought by state attorneys general, often against pharmaceutical companies and healthcare providers. In addition to the cases brought by a single AG, Violation Tracker contains about 120 procurement cases brought by groups of AGs working in concert.
Along with these contracting fraud cases, Violation Tracker contains about 10,000 cases involving non-compliance with laws governing wage levels and other employment practices at companies receiving government contracts or doing work on projects receiving public funding. These include the Davis-Bacon Act, the Service Contract Act and the Public Contracts Act. Violation Tracker also has over 500 cases brought by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) against contractors accused of discriminatory employment practices.
Search Techniques
Violation Tracker offers multiple ways to locate contracting cases. In the Basic Search on the homepage, you can combine a company name with the government contracting option in the offense group dropdown menu.
On the Summaries page (click Other Summaries from the home page) you can retrieve an overview of all contracting cases from the offense group dropdown or an overview for the OFCCP from the Federal Agency Summaries dropdown. The parent company summaries include breakdowns by offense categories, including contracting.
On the Advanced Search page you can combine a company name and other variables with the contracting choice in the offense group dropdown or with the False Claims Act choice in the offense type dropdown. The latter also allows you to select the Davis-Bacon Act and/or the Service Contract Act and the Public Contracts Act. Use the level of government dropdown to limit your search to federal, state or local cases. You can use the full text search box to search contracting-related words or phrases mentioned in the description field of the individual entries.
If you still have questions on how to use Violation Tracker, contact Siobhan Standaert at [email protected].
Last updated March 2024
