Last week, in United States v. Scully, the Second Circuit vacated the conviction of a distributor of pharmaceutical products on misbranding charges due to evidentiary issues surrounding his advice-of-counsel defense at trial.
The Rise and Fall of Pharmalogical
William Scully and Rodi Lameh founded Pharmalogical, Inc,, planning to acquire pharmaceutical products from manufacturers and
The Second Circuit recently agreed to accept an interlocutory appeal to decide the question whether a violation of the False Claims Act’s “first-to-file” rule compels dismissal of the complaint or whether it can be cured by the filing of an amended pleading.
In United States ex rel. Wood v. Allergan, Inc., Relator John Wood
Last week, the Second Circuit held that a False Claims Act relator does not have to plead details of specific alleged false billings or invoices to the government, as long as he can allege facts leading to a strong inference that specific claims were submitted and that information about them are peculiarly within the defendant’s
Health care fraud prosecutions in the Second Circuit and throughout the country have typically sought forfeiture money judgments against all defendants for the proceeds of the fraud obtained by all members of a health care fraud conspiracy. The Supreme Court recently curtailed these efforts in Honeycutt v. United States. In Honeycutt, the Court
The Medicaid Fraud Control Unit (MCFU) of the New York State Office of the Attorney General has recently issued restitution demand letters to providers for allegedly entering into percentage-based contracts with their billing agents. The MCFU letters cite the Medicaid Update March 2001, titled “A Message for Providers Using Service Agents” as follows:
The Supreme Court recently allowed liability through the implied certification theory of the False Claims Act (FCA), which was raised and upheld in Universal Health Services, Inc. v. United States ex rel. Escobar. The decision provided for a new applicable standard and resolved the split among circuit courts on whether to recognize the theory.
The Supreme Court held last week that in a federal health care fraud prosecution, the Sixth Amendment prevents the government from obtaining a pretrial freeze of assets that were untainted by the alleged crime and that defendant sought to use to pay her lawyer.
In Luis v. United States, the government alleged that the
Earlier this month, EDNY Judge Joanna Seybert examined the elements of Aggravated Identify Theft in an interesting context: a motion to unseal grand jury minutes in a health care fraud prosecution, United States v. Cwibeker.
Defendants were charged with billing Medicare for fictitious or non-compensable treatments of residents of assisted living facilities. Defendants would
An interesting SDNY settlement agreement resolves some False Claims Act allegations, but leaves others for another day. Visiting Nurse Service of New York (VNS) paid just under $35 million to the United States and New York State to settle allegations that VNS improperly billed Medicaid for 1,740 members whose needs did not qualify for a
Columbia University agreed to pay $9 million this week in settlement of a SDNY False Claims Act case alleging that it had submitted false claims in connection with federal grants funding AIDS and HIV related work. Columbia was the grant administrator on behalf of ICAP, an entity that received millions of dollars in federal grants