DAAG Brenna Jenny Warns Heightened FCA Enforcement Is “The New Normal,” Addresses Enforcement Priorities and Policies
During her keynote speech at the Federal Bar Association’s Qui Tam Conference, Brenna Jenny, Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Commercial Litigation Branch, stated that robust FCA enforcement is “the new normal.” Key statistics, including those we discussed here, back her up: she revealed that DOJ has issued more than 1,000 Civil Investigative Demands (“CIDs”) in each of the last four years, noted that qui tam actions increased by 33% last year, and that 480 qui tam actions have already been filed so far in fiscal year 2026. She attributed this dramatic increase at least in part to enhanced data mining being conducted by DOJ and whistleblowers. Describing the FCA as a “flexible tool,” Jenny left no doubt that FCA enforcement will remain high even as she acknowledged that it is not “an all-purpose anti-fraud statute.”
DOJ Announces Reinvigorated False Claims Act Cooperation with the Department of Health and Human Services
On July 2, 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) announced the renewal of the DOJ-HHS False Claims Act Working Group, a partnership with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) that aims to strengthen use of the FCA to combat healthcare fraud. This is an initiative that was first announced during the first Trump administration, and follows the announcement of significant personnel changes at DOJ, as discussed here.
HHS-OIG Releases Medicare Advantage Toolkit to Guide Internal Auditing
As discussed here, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) has prioritized investigating whether Medicare Advantage (“MA”) plans and providers have submitted unsupported risk-adjusting diagnosis codes, in violation of the False Claims Act. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (“HHS-OIG”) has also been active in this space and issued a number of audits of MA plans within the past few years, often focusing on diagnosis codes it characterizes as “high risk.” HHS-OIG acknowledged that stakeholders “have asked us to share with them how we decided which diagnosis codes were at high risk for being miscoded,” and in response, HHS-OIG issued this toolkit detailing how it has used data analytics to guide its work. The toolkit offers compliance functions at MA plans and providers a path to assessing whether their coding puts them at risk of government scrutiny.
