"It Pays to Blow the Whistle!"
Whistleblower awarded record US$51.5-million
Firm fined US$2.3B; Former salesman was appalled by Pfizer's tactics
Taking on corporate giants can feel like tilting at windmills, but John Kopchinski's six-year legal battle against Pfizer Inc. just made him a rich man. The Gulf War veteran and former Pfizer sales representative will earn more than US$51.5-million as a result of his whistleblower lawsuit against the world's biggest drugmaker and the record penalty the company must pay the U.S. government for its massive marketing transgressions. Mr. Kopchinski, appalled by Pfizer's tactics in selling the pain drug Bextra, filed a "qui tam" lawsuit in 2003, sparking federal and state probes that led to Wednesday's agreement by the company to pay US$2.3-billion in civil and criminal penalties and plead guilty to a felony charge for promoting Bextra and 12 other drugs for unapproved uses and doses.
"In the Army I was expected to protect people at all costs," he said in a statement. "At Pfizer I was expected to increase profits at all costs, even when sales meant endangering lives. "I couldn't do that," added Mr. Kopchinski, 45, who was fired by Pfizer in March 2003, two years before the company pulled Bextra from the market over concerns it raised the risk of heart attacks and strokes. At the time of his dismissal after raising his concerns with the company, he had a baby son and his wife was pregnant with twins. He went from earning about US$125,000 a year to living off his retirement fund before landing a job with an insurance company for US$40,000 a year. "It was a lot of stress on the family. I pretty much depleted my entire 401(k)," he said. "The last six years have been pretty hard, so going forward it's going to be pretty much easier," said Mr. Kopchinski, noting that college for his young children "is taken care of." Erika Kelton, Mr. Kopchinski's lead attorney from the firm of Phillips & Cohen LLP, said large rewards are justified because of what whistleblowers must endure, often for many years, after complaints within the company go unheeded.
"Particularly in pharma, it's no secret that it's an industry that can blackball former employees," Ms. Kelton said, "so the reward is important both to encourage people to step forward and to recognize that their contributions are huge." Mr. Kopchinski and five other whistleblowers will earn more than US$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," he said. Mr. 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. At the time he was told by managers that the Neurontin suit would be in the news and any physicians who asked questions should be told it was just complaints from a disgruntled former employee, Mr. Kopchinski said. Ironically, after filing the Bextra suit, "I was the disgruntled former employee," he said. "What you see here is a company which essentially had a culture of corruption," said Patrick Burns, a spokesman for Taxpayers Against Fraud, a U.S. non-profit organization that helps connect whistleblowers with attorneys on False Claims Act cases.
Bill Berkrot, Reuters Published: Friday, September 04, 2009
| Posted by Author on Sep 4, 2009 | ||
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