The longest federal shutdown in U.S. history is having devastating effects, placing hundreds of thousands of federal workers in economic peril and potentially crippling the delivery of basic services for Native American tribes. It has also shut down the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), delaying Americans from receiving justice where their employers have illegally […]

Universities and employers have a duty to respond to allegations of sexual assault, harassment, and discrimination. Many organizations conduct investigations before responding, and plaintiffs have filed gender discrimination lawsuits based on the investigations themselves. For one example, read coverage of Sanford Heisler Sharp’s trial about a Columbia University investigation here. Whether an investigation is so […]

New Census Bureau research, comparing the amount of money couples report to the Census with “true” earnings from IRS tax records, shows a surprising result: when women in different-sex couples earn more than their male spouses, “[h]usbands say they earn more than they are and wives underreport their income.” Both spouses exaggerate the man’s earnings […]

The #MeToo movement has shined an unflattering light on employer-mandated arbitration agreements, which commonly prevent victims of sexual harassment from speaking publicly about their experiences. Mandatory and confidential arbitration has the effect of forcing women into silence, while allowing perpetrators to continue to harass and assault other employees.  With the rise of the #MeToo movement, […]

Hourly workers’ paychecks can be unpredictable, varying drastically depending on their hours. Unscrupulous employers exploit this variance to short hourly employees of their full wages for their labor, often undetected. Tipped workers in most states are uniquely vulnerable to wage theft.  Most tipped workers earn a reduced hourly rate – in Washington, D.C., the tipped […]

Medical devices are a crucial component to health care treatment and advancements. With an increasingly competitive market, medical device manufacturers and sales personnel are under pressure to maximize their sales and outpace competitors. To accomplish these objectives, device manufacturers may engage in sales practices that violate the False Claims Act (FCA)—a federal statute that allows […]

The Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) administers customs laws and collects antidumping duties to prevent foreign companies from saturating U.S. markets with below-cost products. These laws require importers to carefully classify and disclose the goods imported to the United States. Because most disclosures are only subject to the “honor-system” importers may mislabel or misrepresent the […]

It’s no secret that Medicare fraud wastes tons of taxpayer money and inflates everyone’s healthcare bills. However, many may not realize that providers may comply with the expected medical standard of care yet still commit Medicare fraud by overbilling for those services. One of a myriad of examples where providers overbill Medicare for services—even those […]

While whistleblowers already have several means to report fraud to the federal government—including the False Claims Act, the IRS whistleblower program, and the SEC and CFTC whistleblower programs—there is a new, bipartisan, fraud-fighting law on the books that rewards whistleblowers for valuable information in the auto industry. Since late 2015, the Motor Vehicle Safety Whistleblower […]

“We need not leave our common sense at the doorstep when we interpret a statute,” wrote a four-Justice plurality of the Supreme Court in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, 490 U.S. 228, 241 (1989), the seminal ruling that gender stereotyping by an employer is actionable as sex discrimination under Title VII. And yet, nearly three decades […]