Bloomberg Law reports on an upcoming legal battle over the denial of Department of Justice request to dismiss a qui tam suit. Over the past two years, federal district courts have granted 25 DOJ motions to dismiss such suits, compared to six in the previous two years, the story notes.
Companies that bill the federal government for services are eager in 2020 to see what courts say about Justice Department decisions to dismiss whistleblower cases it finds to be meritless or a burden on government resources.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit is considering how much deference the federal courts should give to those dismissal decisions in a specific case over whether an Illinois federal judge erred in rejecting the DOJ’s move to dismiss a suit alleging a drug kickback scheme by CVS, Omnicare, and others.
More on the Granston memo, which triggered the dismissals:
A UK view of whistleblowers
A Guardian review of Tom Mueller’s book Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud, starts out like this.
The whistleblower occupies an ambiguous and somewhat ghostly position in the pantheon of behavioral role models. Despised by the authority he or she betrays, the revealer of hidden corporate or governmental truths is seldom embraced as a hero by society at large.
Columnist Andrew Anthony agrees that their stories make compelling movies.
But the chances are, most people who have seen those films won’t remember the names of the whistleblowers they depict: respectively Jeffrey Wigand and Katharine Gun. Even after they’ve gone public, whistleblowers tend to remain shadowy figures, cut off from the industries or positions that brought them to prominence, but with no new role to match the notoriety/celebrity briefly visited upon them.
He quotes Mueller’s description of whistleblowers.
They can be prickly and doctrinaire. They can seem obsessive, even unstable. Reading this book, you get the strong sense that if the characters involved didn’t start out that way, then they had every reason to develop in that direction. To go against the crowd and the prevailing ethos requires a certain independence of spirit, but to withstand the opprobrium, threats, financial ruin and sometimes imprisonment likely to come your way demands a psychological resilience that is bestowed on very few people who, as it were, look normal on television.
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