Qui tam suits also represent a serious financial opportunity for whistleblowers: they stand to share in any funds recovered by the government. The whistleblower is, in other words, a kind of bounty hunter. When the False Claims Act was conceived during the Civil War, the legislature adopted this framework, drawing on early English law, to encourage informers to report people who were scamming the Union army through price gouging and other schemes. The statute offers a reward out of a recognition that whistleblowers (and their lawyers) would otherwise have little incentive to undertake an
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