OT: Duke University Agrees to Pay $112.5 Million in Whistleblower Suit Over Grants

By: selhini on March 27, 2019, 8:58 AM | 11 comments

Not be outdone by their frenemies down the street: Duke University Agrees to Pay $112.5 Million in Whistleblower Suit Over Grants

This is seriously disturbing. It's one thing to "fake school" to allow "students" who are not interested in school to play football. It's totally another thing to falsify research and divert funds away from other schools (ahem!) that could potentially make important discoveries through research.

EDIT: Updated link to Reuters article which should be free. Let me know if it isn't.

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Comments

CBRDog

UNLABEL'D BOTTLE

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| 7 years 4 months #

- you might link a different article, the one can only be read if you join the WSJ.

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I wonder if this paragraph from the DOJ release will bring out other treasure hunters. Not a bad days work for a disgruntled ex-employee:

The allegations were originally brought in a lawsuit filed by Joseph Thomas, a former Duke employee, under the qui tam, or whistleblower, provisions of the False Claims Act, which permit private individuals to sue on behalf of the government and share in any recovery. The Act permits the government to intervene in and take over the whistleblower's suit, or, as in this case, for the whistleblower to pursue the action on the government's behalf. Mr. Thomas will receive $33,750,000 from the settlement.

Chris

TEEMING WITH INTEL

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| 7 years 4 months # ^

Holy shit, $33.75MM for whistleblowing?

yak_butter

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| 7 years 4 months # ^

It is the most (potentially) lucrative kind of blowing.

hokie07ME | 7 years 4 months # ^

Stormy Daniels agrees

hokiebuzz

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| 7 years 4 months # ^

The IRS also has an act for people who provide evidence of tax evasion. The person providing the evidence gets a cut of the taxes owed up to a certain amount.

I am surprised the value is not capped. That is a lot of money.

AZHokie22 | 7 years 4 months # ^

Its crafted in this fashion to reward whistleblowers because their career is basically over once they are identified as the outing party. I don't know the specifics in Mr. Thomas situation, but in Wall Street cases for example the whistleblower may be the only ethical one in the room, but no firm will ever hire them again and take the chance of them exposing any potential wrongdoing.

KopHokie | 7 years 4 months #

A college cheating scandal in North Carolina that doesn't involve UNC? Does not compute

marcb2 | 7 years 4 months # ^

Trust me on this one...UNC has gotten away with plenty wrt malfeasance and poor stewardship of research funding (mostly through incompetence and indifference). And has spent a whole lot of money (think 8 figures) trying to figure out what happened, how to fix some of it, how to ignore some of it and how to hide some of it...

KingJames

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| 7 years 4 months #

I don't understand, Duke fraudulently took $200 mil, agreed to payback 56% of the value and 16% goes to the whistle blower?

So the government recover 40% of the money, good job guys, A+*.

*denote use of UNC grading scale

cd8hokies | 7 years 4 months # ^

Well, 1) It's a settlement, so you don't get 100% of what you want, 2) in qui tam cases such as this one, the gov't actually declined to pursue the case (then whistleblower can pursue the case in the gov't's name) so it recovered 40% of the money while not doing anything.*

*These are just generalities.

KingJames

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| 7 years 4 months # ^

Got it, thanks.

So the UNC grading scale comment was even more spot on, The government gets and A+ for a 40% grade where they didn't do the work, UNC the whole way.