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Letter to New York City Attorney General Alleging Intentional Interference With a WhistleBlower Investigation Alleging Wall Street Defrauded the City of $25 Million
I have set forth below a letter I sent to the New York City Inspector General in January 2024 , making the allegations described above.
The allegations I make are in fact appalling.
To understand, take note that when a whistleblower files a case under New York State Whistleblower Law, He must file it under seal, and provide the government with a copy. The government then has a duty to investigate the case, and file reports with the court every six months, indicating the status of its investigation.
In this case, as the letter explains in greater detail, from the start, the City failed to conduct any proper investigation. The Relator had an expert opinion letter that the transactions were fraudulent; the City never interviewed the expert, and never showed any understanding of the letter to indicate any lawyer read it.
Even further, the Relator provided documentation of his efforts to report the fraud in the transactions to the IRS. Due to confidentiality requirements, the IRS never told the Relator whether or not his efforts resulted in a recovery of taxes. Therefore the City had to obtain this information. The City never took such effort.
The City went further than just failing to investigate; it refused to give Relator basic information in its possession vital to the Relator’s case. For example, Relator was proceeding under a complex theory with respect to statute of limitations. In order to advance this theory, Relator needed to know what the City did when a tax payer with a pre-existing deficiency claimed a refund. Most specifically, did the City, like the IRS, automatically withhold the refund? The City refused to provide this information.
From 2017 to 2018, the City filed three false representations to the Court to the effect it was performing an investigation. In January 2019, the City finally stated it would not intervene in the case. In September 2019, the City unsealed the case so that the Relator could proceed
The most despicable conduct was that of “Attorney X” who, on top of his repeated violation of New York Rules of Professional conduct by filing false reports with the court, ceased any communications with Relator after the court unsealed the case. Attorney X even declined to consent to electronic filing, which burdened the Relator by imposing him on the duty of paper service, a needless distraction in the days of electronic filing.
(Also, in the summer of 2018, Attorney X (who had never interviewed the Relator’s expert) asked for more information demonstrating actual fraud. Relator responded by sending several hundred pages of material. How Attorney X responded to this production will be examined later)
As noted above, after the court unsealed the case in September 2019, Attorney X ceased any communications with me. I felt a duty to email filings to Attorney X nonetheless. As a result, in December 2020, I noticed that an email to Attorney X was returned undeliverable. Some research determined Attorney X left the Law Department for private practice. In an apparent part of Attorney
X’s efforts to get Relator to drop the case, Attorney X never told me of the planned departure.
That is the summary of the sordid effort of the Big Apple to try to get a whistleblower to abandon a qui tam case worth $25 million.
Below is the actual Letter. Please note that the recipient’s name is redacted, as Relator sent this letter originally to a different lawyer within the Law Department. After waiting almost a year for a response and getting none, Relator forwarded the letter to the New York City Inspector General.