The Justice Department secured $4.9 billion in settlements and judgments in civil cases involving fraud against the government in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2012.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a consent order of forfeiture today ordering the civil forfeiture of $6,976,924 traced to international money laundering of the proceeds from an offshore Internet gambling operation that illegally targeted U.S. residents.
The Justice Department’s Consumer Protection Branch secured nearly $2 billion in criminal fines, forfeiture, restitution, and civil disgorgement in 2012, Stuart F. Delery, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division, announced today at the Consumer Protection Working Group’s Second Annual Consumer Protection Summit.
Attorney General Eric Holder announced today $1.8 million in new resources to improve access to criminal legal services and strengthen indigent defense across the nation.
Ohio-based RPM International Inc. and its subsidiary, Tremco Inc., have paid $60.9 million to resolve allegations that Tremco filed false claims in connection with two multiple award schedule (MAS) contracts with the General Services Administration (GSA) for roofing supplies and services.
As the April 15 tax filing deadline approaches, Attorney General Eric Holder warned U.S. tax filers to beware a “rising threat” of scammers seeking fraudulent refunds based on stolen identities, and vowed aggressive enforcement against the practice. Speaking in a recorded video message released on the Justice Department’s website, Attorney General Holder explained that a growing pool of criminals are engaged in the activity, including gangs and drug sellers seeking quick access to cash.
Five California-based masonry subcontractors and two individuals paid the government nearly $1.9 million to resolve allegations that they violated the False Claims Act by misrepresenting their disadvantaged small business status in connection with military construction contracts.
Ashland Hospital Corp. d/b/a King’s Daughters Medical Center (KDMC) has agreed to pay $40.9 million to resolve allegations that it submitted false claims to the Medicare and Kentucky Medicaid programs for medically unnecessary coronary stents and diagnostic catheterizations.
The Justice Department, Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), along with 49 state attorneys general and the District of Columbia’s attorney general have reached a $968 million agreement with SunTrust Mortgage Inc. (SunTrust) to address mortgage origination, servicing, and foreclosure abuses
A co-owner of Professional Medical Home Health LLC was sentenced today to serve 70 months in prison and ordered to pay $6.2 million in restitution for her participation in a health care fraud scheme involving the now defunct home health care company
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Nursing home residents have been among those hardest hit by the new coronavirus. In some states, more than half of the recorded deaths have been long-term care residents. Some of the homes have been cited for putting residents at “immediate jeopardy” of harm or death, our analysis showed.
And many of the affected homes have been previously written up for violating federal standards. That’s true in California, New Jersey and New York.
We’re updating Nursing Home Inspect to include more information about nursing homes across the country, including past problems with infection control practices, and which ones have had cases of COVID-19 among residents or staff.
We introduced this resource in 2012 as a way to search through tens of thousands of nursing home inspection reports to find problems and trends.
You can easily compare the nursing homes in your state based on how many times they have been cited for violating infection control protocols in the past three inspection cycles (roughly three years). We’ve also added data from The Washington Post on homes with COVID-19 cases. Nursing Home Inspect also allows you to sort by the number of health deficiencies cited by regulators; the number of serious deficiencies per home (that is, deficiencies in which patients were put in immediate jeopardy of harm); the amount of fines imposed; and how often the government has suspended payments to the home for new patients, another type of penalty.
Our data is from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which has its own website called Nursing Home Compare. We’ve taken the information and organized it into an easy-to-use resource for families and residents, as well as researchers and other journalists.
Our site includes:
• State pages: Every state has its own section that allows you to compare all of the homes in a state on a variety of indicators.
• Individual nursing home pages: Every home has a section listing all of the health deficiencies identified within the past three survey cycles (roughly three years). The full text of these deficiency reports, if available, can be accessed via links from this page to CMS. Each home’s page also has ownership status — whether for-profit, government-run or nonprofit — and whether the home has been labeled by the government as a Special Focus Facility, meaning that it has many more problems than other homes. We’ve also labeled Special Focus Facility candidates, which meet the criteria to be a special focus facility but haven’t yet been designated as one. (We only include health deficiencies, not fire and safety violations, in this database.)
• State-by-state maps: The main page of the app shows how states compare in terms of the percentage of homes with at least one serious deficiency, the average fine paid by homes in the state, and the percentage of homes in each state with at least one infection-related deficiency.
• Top 20 Lists: We’ve listed the homes that have paid the most in fines in the nation and those with the highest number of serious deficiencies.
If homes violate federal standards, CMS may impose fines or suspend Medicare/Medicaid payments to the nursing home for new residents until the facility corrects the deficiency.
If problems persist or are not fixed, CMS can end its agreement with the nursing home. Additional details about CMS’ approach to enforcement can be found here.
Nursing Home Inspect continues to allow you to search through nearly 80,000 inspection reports by keywords, such as “choke” or “maggots,” to look for issues you care about. These search results can be sorted by date, city, state or severity of the deficiency.
Nursing homes are inspected on both a regular schedule and when there is a complaint. Inspectors typically work for state agencies paid by Medicare. If they find problems, known as deficiencies, they rank them on a scale of A to L, the most severe. The vast majority are either labeled D or E.
What you won’t find on these pages are self-reported quality measures for each home. Those can be found on Nursing Home Compare. We also don’t list the state sanctions imposed against homes because those are not centrally collected. For information on penalties within a given state, you should consult the state agency that regulates nursing homes. The federal government has a list of contacts available here.
When reading through inspection reports, it is a good idea to keep in mind the caveats we’ve outlined previously.
To compile our app, we used different datasets: a listing of all Medicare-certified nursing homes, inspection violations and penalties, and deficiency report narratives.
We merged spreadsheets containing findings from routine inspections and those identified during complaint visits and kept only health violations, not fire safety violations.
We used each home’s unique identification code to match penalties imposed to the dates of their corresponding inspections so we could display that data together for each home. (We also noted some cases in which a penalty date did not have a corresponding inspection in the database.)
You can find the data we used on these sites:
• For a list of nursing homes: https://data.medicare.gov/Nursing-Home-Compare/Provider-Info/4pq5-n9py
• For penalties: https://data.medicare.gov/Nursing-Home-Compare/Penalties/g6vv-u9sr
• For health deficiency information: https://data.medicare.gov/Nursing-Home-Compare/Health-Deficiencies/r5ix-sfxw
• For deficiency report narratives (updated in April 2020): http://downloads.cms.gov/files/Full-Statement-of-Deficiencies-April-2020.zip
The U.N. triples its fundraising target for fighting the coronavirus, even as President Trump plans to freeze U.S. aid to its principal health agency.
New data analyzed by the Los Angeles Times show that nearly half of all COVID-19 deaths in the state are associated with elder care facilities.
Tencent, which first invested in Enflame's pre-Series A round in July 2018, also topped up.
The post Tencent-backed Chinese AI startup Enflame raises nearly $100m Series B funding appeared first on DealStreetAsia.
The VC firm manages four funds with about 2.5 billion yuan ($352 million) in total AUM.
The post Chinese VC Linear Capital reaches first close of latest USD fund at $110m appeared first on DealStreetAsia.
The stewards have fined Ferrari $20,000 after investigating the pitlane incident during qualifying involving Fernando Alonso and Nico Rosberg
Voters and policy makers bemoan our crumbling roads, airports, and public transit systems, but few jurisdictions do much about it. The odd thing is that historically low interest rates now make it cheap to fix or improve our public facilities. The mystery is why decision makers have passed on this opportunity.
The sorry state of the nation’s roads, bridges, and public infrastructure has been widely reported. Every few years the American Society of Civil Engineers draws up a report card on U.S. infrastructure, highlighting its strengths and shortcomings in a variety of areas—drinking water systems, wastewater, dams, roads, bridges, inland waterways, ports. The report card spotlights areas where spending on maintenance falls short of the amount needed to keep our infrastructure functioning efficiently. For many kinds of infrastructure, a bigger population and heavier utilization require us to invest in brand new facilities. In its latest report card, the ASCE awards our public infrastructure a grade of D+.
It’s hard to think of a time more attractive for public investment than years when total demand for goods and services is depressed. The Treasury’s borrowing cost for investment funds is near historical lows. Since 2011, the interest rate on 10-year government bonds has averaged 2.3 percent. Savers buying inflation-protected bonds have been willing to lend funds to the federal government at a real interest rate of just 0.22 percent.
So long as there is excess unemployment, especially in the building trades, the labor resources needed to fix or improve public facilities should be abundant and relatively inexpensive. Employment in the construction industry has rebounded as home building and business investment have improved. Nonetheless, construction employment has recovered only half the loss it experienced between its pre-recession peak in 2006 and its post-recession low in 2011. Skilled labor is not nearly as abundant as it was in 2011, but the trend in wage inflation does not suggest employers are bidding up worker salaries.
The federal government’s failure to use fiscal policy and, in particular, public investment policy to bring the nation closer to full employment represents a notable lapse in policymaking, perhaps the most grievous lapse since the crisis began. It unnecessarily prolonged the suffering of the nation’s long-term unemployed and it wasted a rare opportunity to rebuild the nation’s public infrastructure at relatively low cost.
Why did this failure occur? One reason is that policy makers were too optimistic when the financial crisis took place back in 2008. Most public and private forecasts at the time understated the severity of the economic fallout from the bank meltdown. Decision makers in Congress and the Administration may have believed infrastructure investment would be unhelpful in the recovery. Well-conceived infrastructure projects take many months to design and many years to complete. Policy makers may have believed the economic crisis would be over by the time federally infrastructure spending reached its peak.
When forecasters and Democratic policy makers recognized their error, voters had elected a Congress that supported only one kind of fiscal policy to deal with the crisis—big tax cuts focused on high-income tax payers. Whether or not such a policy could have been effective, it would not make additional funds available for infrastructure projects.
Harvard’s Lawrence Summers and Rachel Lipset recently pointed to another reason voters have failed to back a big program to boost infrastructure investment—government ineptitude. In the Boston Globe they documented the painfully slow progress of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation in overhauling a bridge across the Charles River. The bridge, which was built over 11 months back in 1912, has so far required four years for its reconstruction. No end date is in sight. In addition to the over-budget cost of the project, the overhaul has also caused massive and highly visible inconvenience for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians trying to move between Boston and Cambridge.
Few readers can be under the illusion Boston’s experience is exceptional. Many of us pass near or use public facilities that are being rebuilt or repaired. We often see bafflingly little progress over a span of months or even years. As Summers and Lipset note, the conspicuous failure of public managers to complete capital projects speedily and on budget undermines voters’ confidence that infrastructure projects can be worthwhile.
Despite wide agreement the nation’s infrastructure needs to be modernized, we have made little progress toward that goal. On the contrary, government capital spending has shrunk significantly as a share of the economy. In 2014, net government investment spending on items other than defense dipped to a 60-year low when spending is measured as a percent of GDP. Using this indicator, net government investment has shrunk almost half compared with its level in the first decade of the century. For many reasons this is a good time to fix our public infrastructure. It is also an excellent time to overhaul public management of government capital projects.
Editor's note: This piece originally appeared in Inside Sources.
Happy New Year! This week marks Carnival of the Green #208, and the first Carnival of 2010. Congratuations to all who have submitted entries and hosted over the years to make it such a success!
A government report has found that selenium contamination is connected to fish deformities, including two-headed trout.
These photos reveal the horror of our disposable, consumerist culture and how it's ruining the most beautiful places on Earth.
Cooling servers requires a lot of energy, so why not locate them somewhere that is always cold?
Experts have predicted a "high risk" of rupture on this aging oil pipeline that has recently been approved to bring Alberta tar sands crude to Eastern Canada.
There's a lot to look forward to, but what should we expect to see more of in the short-term?
Two steps forward, one step back for Japan. The rest of the world has moved on from whaling, why couldn't they do too?
The World Customs Organization and INTERPOL retrieved thousands of endangered animals during a sweep of arrests across 109 countries.
Working in shared office spaces is an attractive solution for creative start-ups, and has become more and more sought-after in many of the bigger cities. Green Spaces in Manhattan has turned into a well-working
It is now 100 seconds to midnight, closer to midnight than at any point since the clock's creation in 1947.
Pastoral life has long been emblematic of a harmonious relationship between man and nature -- but that was all shattered recently in a horrific accident that killed nearly an entire flock of sheep. The incident took place on a roadway
With aging baby boomers and young people who can't afford housing, there's going to be a huge market for these.
State regulators have found boron, arsenic, selenium and other toxic metals near 14 power plants, all in excess of state health standards.
In advance of EPA's coal ash standards, a mother of four talks about her family's health problems due to nearby coal ash ponds.
Fast food is the enemy of green food, so why does an overweight America still eat so much fast food?
One of the big NIMBY complaints about wind turbines is the constant blinking lights that make them visible to aircraft. A new sensor system would eliminate the nuisance, lighting the turbines only when planes are approaching.
Fossil fuel company executives and D.C. politicians have long worked together to ensure coal and oil prices stay low enough to keep Americans hooked. Here's how we can break the addiction.
Along with the iconic Hunter rainboot, the company has a huge collection of items that have no animal materials or animal by-products during the manufacturing process.
Airbnb plans to lay off as many as 1,900 employees, or about 25% of the company, a source confirmed to CNBC on Tuesday.
Airlines want the government to loosen the amount of air service they're required to provide as the number of passengers on board hits the lowest since the 1950s.
Oil prices reversed gains to settle lower on Thursday, despite optimism surrounding producers scaling back production as well as demand improving.
Stephens Inc. said its estimate is based on an analysis of online menus for every Wendy's location nationwide.
For everyday Americans with good credit, historically low interest rates on mortgages and credit cards can be a lifesaver. Riskier borrowers will have to look elsewhere for relief.
Home sales took a deep dive in March as the coronavirus pandemic shut down much of the economy, and homebuyers and sellers pulled out of the normally busy spring market.
The Federal Reserve painted a dour picture of current conditions and pledged Wednesday to continue its historically aggressive policy.
Cramer said that he viewed Buffett bailing on airlines as a sign that there were serious issues in the broader economy.
During the Labor Day holiday that ran from May 1 to May 5 this year, China recorded tourism revenue of 47.56 billion yuan ($6.79 billion), down nearly 60% from last year, according to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
