Massachusetts

A settlement has been reached in a whistleblower class action lawsuit brought against Mercy Health Springfield Communities, formerly known as St. John’s Health System Inc., and Mercy Clinic Springfield Communities, formerly known as St. John’s Clinic.  They are accused of engaging in improper financial relationships with referring physicians.

The whsitleblower will receive $825,000 from the recovery.

Originally filed in 2013, the lawsuit allges that the defendants submitted false claims to the Medicare program for services rendered to patients referred by physicians who received bonuses based on a formula that improperly took into account the value of the physicians’ referrals of patients to the clinic.  Federal law restricts the financial relationships that hospitals and clinics may have with doctors who refer patients to them.

A settlement has been reached in a whistleblower class action lawsuit brought against Dynamics Research Corporation (DRC) who is accused of engaging in a fraudulent kickback scheme involving two technical services contracts with the Air Force.

The contracts, first awarded in 1996, sought DRC’s expertise in procuring computer equipment and services for the Theater Battle Management Core Systems (TBMCS) program at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts. The TBMCS program provides the military with an integrated system to plan and execute air battle plans for operations and intelligence personnel at the force and unit levels. The contracts required DRC’s employees to certify that neither they nor their spouses had financial interests that would interfere with their ability to deliver unbiased advice while performing the contracts. DRC failed to obtain the certificates from former vice presidents Paul Arguin and Victor Garber, who headed the project.

The United States alleged that from 1997 to 2000, DRC, through Mr. Arguin and Mr. Garber, steered Air Force contracts for computer equipment and services to companies owned by themselves, Mr. Arguin’s wife, and others, in exchange for kickbacks and inflated contract prices that produced windfall profits for the two DRC executives. In one of the schemes, Arguin and Garber allegedly substituted inexpensive memory modules for those required by the contract, causing the Air Force to overpay for the nonconforming modules.