The Chamber of Commerce has commenced a well-financed and aggressive lobbying campaign to undermine America’s most effective whistleblower law, the False Claims Act. To justify its anti-whistleblower campaign the Chamber published a report entitled, “Fixing the False Claims Act: the Case For Compliance-Focused Reforms.” The purpose of this blog series is to combat the Chamber’s misinformation, and explain why the False Claims Act must be protected.
Whistleblowers and their supporters are strongly urged to read this blog series and share it with friends. In addition, an Action Alert has been issued by the National Whistleblower Center so members of the public inform their representatives that the False Claims Act should not be “reformed” as proposed by the Chamber.
Fact Number 5:
The Ethics Resource Center (ERC), in its “National Business Ethics Survey of the U.S. Workforce 2013,” found that whistleblower reward laws, such as the False Claims Act, significantly increased the likelihood that employees would report fraud and misconduct “both internally and externally.”
FCA attorneys or whistleblower-advocacy groups do not sponsor the ERC. Instead, major corporations such as Bechtel, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, United Technologies, and Walmart sponsor its surveys.
According to the ERC, whistleblower laws, such as the False Claims Act, resulted in a 30% increase in the likelihood of employees reporting misconduct internally and a 35% increase in employees reporting misconduct to the federal government. These findings are also supported by the DOJ’s statistics, which demonstrates how, over time, more and more employees are willing to risk their careers and report fraud to the government.
The Chamber’s recommendations, if adopted would result in a major decrease in the willingness of employees to disclose fraud to their employers and to the government.
