We all know about “Informer’s Act” or “Lincoln’s Law”, don’t we? Yes, this is the original law that becomes inspiration of law of FCA that prohibited various act to get money from government in illegal way. Actually, this law was created on March 2, 1863 by President Lincoln. On that year, Congress also passed the law that support the FCA law, which is control the fraud against government that done by private individuals.
Actually, FCA was used for solving many problems that caused by fraud that many private individual did against United States Army during the Civil War. The FCA used and applied on all government departments. And the private individual that caught by this law must pay for each illegal claim that they’ve done to government about $2000 for each false claim, plus double penalty with same amount of damage that government receive. However, there’re many way to slip through this law, one of them is qui tam.
At that time, there were qui tam attorney that become the controller of all government act. If something wrong, they can report it and bring it to the court. And because of this, from 1986, where the law was passed, government recovered nearly$22 billion between 1987 and 2008.