False Claims Act Statistics: Annual Recoveries and the Cases Behind the Totals

False Claims Act statistics show record federal settlements and judgments in fiscal 2025, with most of the year’s dollars coming from cases whistleblowers brought. Behind those totals are billing decisions, contract prices and unpaid import duties. If you know how a business changed the information behind a payment or kept duties it owed, you may know the part of the story the national figures cannot tell.

The Department of Justice’s January 16, 2026 annual release and statistical overview cover the complete fiscal series through September 30, 2025. The tables below carry that edition’s figures for every year back to fiscal 1987. They put the dollars beside who brought the cases, while keeping whistleblower awards separate from the government’s total.

What These False Claims Act Statistics Count

The Justice Department counts new matters, settlements and judgments, and whistleblower share awards separately. Each tells a different part of the enforcement story.

New qui tam cases are cases brought by whistleblowers in the government’s name. New non-qui-tam matters are government-originated referrals and investigations.

The qui tam dollar columns distinguish cases the United States intervened in or otherwise pursued from cases it declined. In a case the government joins, the whistleblower still started it.

The settlements-and-judgments columns record federal civil recoveries arising from False Claims Act investigations.

A whistleblower case under the False Claims Act can pay 15% to 30% of what the government recovers. The department’s share-award columns track that separate measure.

Fiscal 2025 at a Glance

Whistleblowers brought a record number of new qui tam cases in fiscal 2025. Their cases also supplied most of the dollars in the highest annual recovery total the department had reported.

A substantial part came from cases whistleblowers continued after the government declined. The pursued and declined columns below put those results side by side.

Annual Recoveries and New Matters, Fiscal 1987 Through 2025

Dollar columns use U.S. dollars of the year recorded.

New Matters and Total Settlements and Judgments

The newest year appears first. The cumulative row is the department’s published total for the whole period.

Qui Tam Outcomes and Whistleblower Share Awards

The pursued and declined columns show recoveries with and without government participation. Whistleblower share awards appear separately. Settlements and judgments recognized in a fiscal year are not a tally of cash received that year. The annual award and recovery columns do not necessarily cover the same cases or payment periods. Dividing one by the other does not give an individual whistleblower’s award rate.

The modern series begins after Congress strengthened qui tam enforcement in 1986. The Congressional Research Service’s 2009 report, Qui Tam: The False Claims Act and Related Federal Statutes, explains that those amendments revived private enforcement and increased the maximum whistleblower share. The whistleblower columns track the mechanism Congress chose to encourage people with information to come forward.

Health Care, Defense and Other Federal Matters

Health care dominates the fiscal 2025 dollars, while the Other category has the most new qui tam cases. The department groups these figures by the primary client agency, so the agency label matters as much as the amount.

Healthcare cases reach hospitals billing for care, organizations supplying diagnosis data to Medicare Advantage plans, and manufacturers whose products lead to claims submitted by someone else.

Defense contracting puts different business records behind a payment: product qualifications and certified pricing data. Across these agency categories, cases also reach research grants and mortgage insurance.

Customs fraud reaches money a business keeps. Importers declare where goods came from and how they are classified, information that determines the duties owed. The Justice Department described its cross-agency Trade Fraud Task Force, launched in August 2025 to pursue tariff and duty evasion. Its annual account names Allied Stone among the customs settlements, at $12.4 million.

The department’s annual account also identifies more than $52 million from nine cybersecurity settlements and more than $230 million from over 200 pandemic-relief settlements and judgments. The point for an insider is the payment relationship: which representation helped the business obtain government money or keep money it owed?

What the Numbers Mean for an Insider

Annual recoveries measure settlements and judgments recognized in that fiscal year. We would not use a national dollar total to put odds on your evidence. The useful question is what the business told the government, what actually happened, and who knew the difference.

Why the Numbers Change Between Editions

The Justice Department revises earlier years when it publishes later statistics. The fiscal year being measured and the edition reporting it are both part of the figure.

The earlier editions show the change particularly clearly:

The fiscal 2023 package and the fiscal 2024 package reported those earlier values. The revised figures appear in the national table above.

Large Judgments Can Shape an Entire Year

The fiscal 2025 record includes large whistleblower-run trials as well as a major government-pursued judgment. Their scale helps explain why the annual dollar total can move sharply without describing a typical case.

The Justice Department’s account of major trial results reported a $1.6 billion trial result against Janssen Products in a case pursued by whistleblowers. The court’s opinion describes the jury’s finding of False Claims Act liability over promotion of the HIV drugs Prezista and Intelence.

In another trial the department identifies as whistleblower-run, CVS Caremark faced a judgment of $289,873,500 entered on August 19, 2025. The court decided that case after a trial without a jury.

The government-pursued Omnicare and CVS Health case produced a $948.8 million judgment in August 2025 following a jury verdict concerning more than three million false claims. We see the absurdity in that scale: false claims counted by the million.

These trial results and judgments explain the scale of the annual accounting. For the person who knows the business behind a payment, the evidence remains more useful than the size of the national headline.

The Case Behind the Numbers

If you recognize the false billing, pricing decision or import declaration behind government money paid out or duties left unpaid, speak to one of our Whistleblower Experts about what you know. We assess where your knowledge matters most, build the case with False Claims Act whistleblower lawyers who know the payment or duty system involved, and stay beside you through the pursuit of a recovery.