US Justice Department Joins Whistleblower Lawsuits

by Glen Shapiro, LawAndTax-News.com, New York

23 April 2007

The United States Department of Justice announced last Thursday that it has intervened in three whistleblower suits alleging that Hewlett-Packard Company (HP), Accenture LLP, and Sun Microsystems Inc. solicited and provided improper payments and other items of value on technology contracts with government agencies.

The suits, originally filed in the US District Court in Little Rock, Ark., by Norman Rille and his co-plaintiff Neal Roberts, allege that HP, Accenture and Sun submitted false claims to the United States for information technology hardware and services on numerous government contracts from the late 1990s to the present.

The core of the allegations, in which the United States has joined by filing its own complaints, is that the defendants systematically solicited and/or made payments of money and other things of value, known as “alliance benefits,” to a number of companies with whom they had global “alliance relationships” or an agreement to work together.

The government’s complaints assert that these alliance relationships and the resulting alliance benefits amounted to kickbacks and undisclosed conflict of interest relationships.

“The Department of Justice is acting in this case to protect the integrity of the procurement process,” explained Peter Keisler, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division.

The suits were originally filed under the qui tam or whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act. Under that statute, a private party, known as a “relator,” can file an action on behalf of the United States and receive a portion of the recovery.

Under the False Claims Act, the United States may recover three times the amount of its losses plus civil penalties. The government filed its complaint in intervention in the matters on April 12, 2007. The complaints were unsealed on Thursday.

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