The Department of Justice (DOJ) recovered a record $6.8 billion under the False Claims Act (FCA) in the 2025 fiscal year. This amount is the highest single-year total in the FCA’s 166-year history, according to a January 16 press release.
Whistleblower-initiated complaints yielded $5.3 billion of that recovery, the largest amount recovered through qui tam lawsuits since the FCA’s modern qui tam program was established in 1986. This sum also exceeds the total amount recovered under the FCA in all but two years since 1986, demonstrating the scale of enforcement efforts facilitated by whistleblowers in 2025.
The FCA sets penalties for fraudulent use of government funds, frequently addressing false or inflated charges from government contractors. The Act’s qui tam provision allows whistleblowers to file suit on behalf of the government when they have evidence of fraud or corruption. In some qui tam cases, the government chooses to pursue a case after the whistleblower files suit; in others, the whistleblower pursues the case all the way to recovery. In 2025, whistleblowers filed 1,297 qui tam suits, the most ever filed in a single fiscal year.
In a recent Law360 article, leading whistleblower attorney David Colapinto noted that whistleblowers are increasingly willing to continue litigating cases after the government declines to intervene. “In the past,” he said, “some of those cases might have just been dropped by the whistleblowers, but in recent years, the whistleblower bar, or qui tam bar, has been stepping up to litigate cases out of seal. Those have resulted in some large recoveries, both through settlements and through judgments.”
When a qui tam lawsuit results in a successful recovery, the whistleblower who filed it is eligible to receive an award of between 15% and 30% of the total amount collected by the government. These percentages were established in the 1986 False Claims Act Amendments, championed by current Senate President Pro Tempore and longtime whistleblower supporter Chuck Grassley (R-IA). These amendments also included whistleblower protection provisions and made qui tam suits easier to file. In 2025, FCA whistleblowers received over $330 million in awards.
“The False Claims Act remains the government’s single greatest tool to fight waste,” Grassley said. FCA cases have led to nearly 70% of all DOJ recoveries in civil fraud cases since 1987. This year, over 80% of FCA settlements and judgments involved healthcare fraud, according to the DOJ. Military spending fraud and customs duty evasion ranked as the next-highest categories.
This record-setting year for qui tam recoveries highlights the role whistleblowers play in government fraud enforcement. Whistleblowers accounted for more than three-quarters of the $6.8 billion recovered in 2025.
