For governments looking for a cheap, easy way to curb fraud and corruption in government contracts, the American False Claims Act seems like a no lose proposition.  It authorizes private citizens to file civil suits against companies they believe have cheated the federal government, and if their suit succeeds, the citizen is entitled to anywhere between 15 to 30 percent of any damages the government collects.  The offer of a reward creates an army of volunteer investigators and lawyers willing to invest their own time and energy into ferreting out fraud and corruption.  If they win the case, the government recoups most of its losses.  If they lose, the government isn’t out a cent.  The data suggests that False Claims Act suits have indeed been a bonanza for the U.S. government.  Recoveries in recent years have exceeded $2 billion per year with an average of $1.7 billion going to the government and the rest to citizen sleuths.

Before copying the False Claims Act verbatim, however, policymakers will want to consider University of Houston Law Center Professor David Kwok’s paper on why the statute seems to work well in the U.S., why an exact copy might not work so well elsewhere, and how it might be changed to fit countries where conditions differ from those in the United States.  The paper is the third in the series of papers commissioned by the Open Society Justice Initiative on civil society and anticorruption litigation, following earlier ones on standing by GAB editor-in-chief Matthew Stephenson and on civil society litigation in India by Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy Director Arghya Sengupta. As with those by Matthew and Arghya, David’s paper provides civil society activists and policymakers wanting to bolster the enforcement of anticorruption laws in their country much to deliberate on.