by Matt Renner
Last year, swearing in before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Capitol Hill, Blackwater USA Chief Executive Erik Prince testified about security contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
(Photo: Reuters / Larry Downing)
A backlog of whistleblower lawsuits against military contractors has been swelling and festering since the early days of the so-called war on terror.
According to critics, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has blocked the progress of these lawsuits to spare the Bush administration a major political black eye should the truth about ongoing war profiteering be revealed, a charge the DOJ denies.
Under the False Claims Act, a civil war era law, when an employee of a company thinks they have evidence that their company is defrauding the US government, the individual can file a lawsuit on behalf of the government against the contractor by filing a special lawsuit called a qui tam - a Latin abbreviation for "he who sues in this matter for the king as for himself."
The exact number of qui tam cases stuck in legal limbo is unknown because the cases are kept under strict seal. But sources who have been following the issue closely estimate that there are between 50 and 70 Iraq contracting fraud cases under seal. Under normal circumstances, when the DOJ receives a qui tam case, it conducts an investigation into the whistleblower's claims. If there is sufficient evidence of significant fraud, the DOJ joins with the whistleblower to sue the company in question and recover the government's money. The whistleblower can receive up to 30 percent of money recovered as a reward for their service to the taxpayer.
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