Whistleblower Protection Blog : Whistleblower Lawyer & Attorney : National Whistleblower Legal Defense and Education Fund : Whistleblower Protection, Fraud Claims : Washington DC

Federal Judge Richard W. Roberts has denied a motion to dismiss a major suit claiming the Japanese manufacturer Toyobo sold millions of dollars of defective bulletproof vests.

Dr. Aaron Westrick filed the suit under the Federal False Claims Act in 2004, and the U.S. government formally joined the suit in 2005. The suit alleges that Toyobo conspired with Second Chance Body Armor, Inc. to sell defective body armor made of Toyobo's Zylon material.

Thousands of vests were sold to police departments across the United States and the federal government. One police officer was killed and others were injured as a result of the use of defective Zylon in vests. The suit alleges that Toyobo and the companies who sold these vests knew about Zylon defects and concealed this information from their customers. The full text of a press release by the National Whistleblowers Center (NWC), with links to key documents, follows in the continuation of this blog entry.
 

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Pipe manufacturer JM Eagle is lashing out against whistleblower John Hendrix, claiming that he spoke to a prospective witness and offered that witness a kick-back. JM Eagle has made the claim in an interview with industry magazine PlasticsNews. Meanwhile, Hendrix's attorneys at the Washington, DC, law firm of Phillips & Cohen are denying the allegation, calling it a distraction.  Hendrix was an engineer with JM Eagle, and he claims that the company knowingly supplied pipe that lacked the required tensile strength. JM Eagle denies that allegation. Still, anyone who likes to have water arrive cleanly to their home, and not flooding their streets, will appreciate the value of good tensile strength. 

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Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has introduced a bill that will make changes to the False Claims Act (FCA) in response to court decisions that limited the rights of whistleblowers.  The main features of S. 2964 (introduced January 28, 2010) would add administrative procedures designed to make it more difficult for crooks to set up phony medical providers to submit false bills to Medicare and Medicaid.  However, in a third branch of the bill, Sen. Grassley proposes to fix a writing error introduced last year to the anti-retaliation provision. Sen. Grassley also proposes a nationwide two-year statute of limitations for retaliation claims.  The national statute of limitations would address the Supreme Court's holding in Graham County Soil & Water Conservation Dist. v. United States ex rel. Wilson, 545 U.S. 409 (2005). The Supreme Court said that the FCA's six-year statute of limitations did not apply to the FCA's whistleblower protection claims.  Whistleblowers would have to respect the statute of limitations in their home state instead. (Karen Wilson's retaliation claim was then dismissed because she missed North Carolina's three-year statute of limitations.) Sen. Grassley also proposes to expand the definition of "original source" so that a whistleblower can still receive rewards if he or she has, "knowledge that is independent of and materially adds to the publicly disclosed allegations or transactions, and has voluntarily provided the information to the Government before filing an action . . .." The Senate has referred S. 2964 to its Finance Committee.

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