How This All Started
Andrew Baker sued Quest Diagnostic and LabCorp under the Civil War-era False Claims Act, also called the Lincoln Law. This is an American federal law that imposes liability on persons and companies (usually federal contractors) who defraud government programs. It allows for people who are not affiliated with the government to file actions on behalf of the government, informally called whistleblowing.
Baker who now runs Huntington Life Sciences, a pharmaceutical industry contract research organization, says of the case now against Quest Diagnostic: ``What got me going was a tax demand for $1.8 million from the IRS and it was all because the accountants at Unilab basically filled in that the shares I received as capital and treated as a capital gain were in fact stock options and therefore subject to income tax. And Quest now owned the company and refused to put it right. And that was very upsetting and that got me re-engaged. I was able to resolve the issue with the IRS, but I got myself to the point where I didn`t like the practice and felt I should file a whistleblower case``.
The case he filed against LabCorp (to read click here freepdfhosting.com/219a016354.pdf ) was initially sealed. However, when the Justice Department had federal prosecutors notify the courts that the Department ``has not made its intervention decision as of this time``, District Court Judge George Daniels, unsealed the LabCorp case this past September.