The Avanti Law Group: Under False Claims Act

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The Avanti
Group
Under False Claims Act, whistleblowers get their
share of billions
By Rich Lord / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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Under False Claims Act, whistleblowers get their
share of billions Constance Lyttle's job at ATT
slowly shifted from helping deaf people make
phone calls, to assisting the efforts of foreign
scam artists intent on ripping off
Americans. She refused to play along, and was
eventually fired by ATT, which was getting
millions of dollars in government funds to run a
scam-plagued system for relaying the calls of
deaf people. "I didn't have a college degree.
There's not a lot of good jobs here" in the
Mercer area, Ms. Lyttle, 56, said this month. "I
had bills to pay, just like everybody else in
America."
Constance Lyttle of Mercer successfully sued ATT
for allowing a government-funded system designed
for the hearing impaired to become a tool of
international scam artists.
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'Ecstatic that they believed me Ms. Lyttle had
been employed with ATT Corp. at a New Castle
center since 1997, facilitating calls placed by
deaf people. The system, called
Telecommunications Relay Service Internet
Protocol Relay, allowed the caller to use a web
portal to type their side of the conversation.
Ms. Lyttle would read it to the intended
recipient. Then she would type the response back
to the caller, with the Federal Communications
Commission footing the bill at anywhere from
1.28 to 1.53 per minute.
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More claims, more dollars President Abraham
Lincoln signed the False Claims Act in 1863
because defense contractors were gouging the
Union and selling faulty armaments. Congress
defanged the law in 1943, in the midst of the
World War II buildup, and it fell into
disuse. News in 1985 that the armed services
were paying 435 for hammers and 640 for toilet
seats, plus the Department of Defense's
announcement that 45 of its largest 100
contractors were under investigation, prompted
Congress to revive the act. Sen. Charles
Grassley, R-Iowa, and Rep. Howard Berman,
D-Calif., restored mandatory payments to
whistleblowers. They also raised the stakes,
allowing courts to charge those caught defrauding
the government triple the damages they caused,
plus penalties.
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