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H.R. 1274, To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to exclude from gross income amounts awarded to qui tam plaintiffs (2 comments ↓)
- This item is from the 110th Congress (2007-2008) and is no longer current. Comments, voting, and wiki editing have been disabled, and the cost/savings estimate has been frozen.
H.R. 1274 would amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to exclude from gross income amounts awarded to qui tam plaintiffs.
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Dan
September 26, 2008, 2:52pm (report abuse)People who vote against this bill simply do not understand it. The False Claims Act states that the citizen bringing a suit against a fraudulent party is entitled to 15 - 25 % of the recovery. when the recovery award is considered gross income and therefore taxable the actual award is far less than 15 - 25 % of the recovery. Most importantly the government would not have recouped any money if the private citizen didn't come foward against the fraudulent party. These suits recover millions of dollars for the government (taxpayers) that otherwise would not be recovered if not for the qui tam suit.
Dan
September 29, 2008, 3:46pm (report abuse)Private citizens have saved taxpayers more than $9.3 billion by reporting health-care fraud — a good thing, because government has done a poor job of rooting it out. For one thing, Medicare officials apparently told outside auditors not to bother with comparing sales invoices to doctors' orders as required by law, according to a New York Times report on an inspector general's investigation.
Inspectors reportedly found that more than a third of the money spent in 2005-'06 on durable medical equipment — things like power wheelchairs and oxygen supplies — shouldn't have been. That added up to about $2.8 billion in one year for one subset of health-care costs. Medicare officials say the audit's estimate is “preposterous.”
Meanwhile, private citizens are responsible for more than 90 percent of the Justice Department's health-care fraud lawsuits. And the $9.3 billion recovery estimate doesn't include all cases examined from 1996