New Jersey

A former city employee who claimed she was fired for acting as a whistleblower on official misconduct filed a complaint in April 2011.  Her specific accusations were that the city was in violation of New Jersey's Conscientious Employee Protection Act when it fired her for whistleblowing during her employment. The details of the settlement were not disclosed.

Between 1995 until her dismissal in 2011, the whistleblower served as the city's principal personnel clerk. She was barred from asserting several pieces of evidence if the case went to trial. The barred evidence included her claim the city fired her for cooperating with FBI agents conducting an investigation in 2005 during Operation Bid Rig.

Operation Bid Rig was the state's largest federal corruption sting, targeting dozens of politicians and officials in Monmouth and Ocean counties and elsewhere in the state.

A settlement has been reached in a whistleblower class action lawsuit brought against The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) who is accused of defrauding Medicaid by submitting duplicate claims for payment.

The whistleblower will receive a $801,000 share of the total federal recovery.

The whistleblwoer case, filed in July 2004, alleged that From 1993 to 2004, UMDNJ’s University Hospital submitted claims to Medicaid for outpatient physician services that were also being billed by doctors working in the hospital’s outpatient centers. By submitting duplicate claims for payment, University Hospital effectively doubled billed the government’s Medicaid program.

A $10.4 Million penalty has been issued for violations of the Act to Prevent Pollution and felony obstruction of justice charges against Columbia Shipmanagement (Deutschland) GmbH (CSM-D), a German corporation, and Columbia Shipmanagement Ltd. (CSM-CY), a Cypriot company.

According to the sentence details, $2.6 million of the penalty will be directed to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to fund community service projects selected to help restore the coastal environment of New Jersey and Delaware hit by Hurricane Sandy.  The remaining $7.8 million is designated as a criminal fine. 

The shipping firms admitted that four of their ships - three oil tankers and one container ship - had intentionally bypassed required pollution prevention equipment and falsified the oil record book, a required log regularly inspected by the U.S. Coast Guard.  The case is the largest vessel pollution settlement in either New Jersey or Delaware. 

The companies previously pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Susan D. Wigenton on March 21, 2013, to six counts involving three vessels in New Jersey and four counts involving one ship in Delaware.  The counts consist of violations of the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships for failing to maintain an accurate oil record book, obstruction of justice and making false statements.

The Delaware investigation began in October 2012 after several crew members of the M/T Nordic Passat provided the Coast Guard with a thumb drive containing photographs and video showing how illegal discharges had been sent overboard through the ship’s sewage system.

The investigation into the M/T King Emerald was launched on May 7, 2012, after several crew members provided cell phone photos and other evidence to Coast Guard officers conducting a routine inspection. 

The charges involving the M/V Cape Maas stem from a whistleblower report to the Coast Guard when the ship visited the port in San Francisco.  The whistleblower provided a video showing the operation of the oily water separator pumping overboard without the use of the oil content monitor to detect and prevent oil from being illegally discharged.    

Violations on a fourth ship, the M/T Cape Taft, which was anchored in New York waters and destined for New Jersey, were uncovered just weeks before the March plea, after the ship disclosed problems to CSM-D.

A settlement has been reached in a whistleblower class action lawsuit brought against two New Jersey hospitals,Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center (OLL) in Camden, N.J., and Lourdes Medical Center of Burlington County (LMC) in Willingboro, N.J. They are accused of fraudulently inflating charges to Medicare.

The whistleblower will receive $356,000, plus interest.

Originally filed in 2005, The United States alleged that LMC fraudulently inflated its charges to Medicare patients to obtain enhanced reimbursement from Medicare. In addition to its standard payment system, Medicare provides supplemental reimbursement, called "outlier payments," to hospitals and other health care providers in cases where the cost of care is unusually high. Congress enacted the supplemental outlier payments system to give hospitals the incentive to treat inpatients whose care requires unusually high costs. The lawsuit alleged that the hospital inflated its charges to obtain supplemental outlier payments for cases that were not extraordinarily costly and for which outlier payments should not have been paid.

The United States conducted a separate investigation of OLL. The government alleged, as a result of that investigation, that the hospital also wrongfully obtained excessive outlier payments.