“Kopchinski and five other whistleblowers will earn more than $102 million in payments from the U.S. government under the False Claims Act through which individuals can reap rewards for exposing corporate wrongdoing.
“The use of whistleblowers has really opened up the keys to the kingdom in terms of what’s going on in these companies,” said Dean Zerbe, senior counsel for the National Whistleblower Center and a partner at the law firm of Zerbe, Fingeret, Frank and Jadav in Washington.
“You’d never find out what’s happening without this kind of reward structure,” Zerbe said.
Kopchinski was hired by former Pfizer CEO Edward Pratt in 1992 after carrying out a correspondence with him while serving as a platoon leader in a military police company on the Saudi Arabia–Kuwait border during the Gulf War.
Under a later Pfizer regime, he was selling the epilepsy drug Neurontin when a previous whistleblower suit was filed against the company over similar illegal promotion tactics that led to stiff penalties and a form of corporate probation.”
