Small Business Grant Fraud Attorney
Small Business Grant Fraud
“In many instances, Energia merely ‘cut and pasted’ the concepts, text, data and tables from one of the above contracts and simply inserted it, in whole or in part, into another without performing any additional substantive research or analysis,” according to the Complaint which details how Lavid’s EPA and Air Force contract work plans were nearly identical.
The Government also alleged that Lavid improperly subcontracted out to Rutgers and Princeton Universities research that was supposed to be performed by Lavid at his laboratory, according to the Settlement Agreement filed in this case. Congress created SBIR in 1982 to channel federal funds as seed money into for-profit small businesses engaged in scientific or engineering research or research and development.
Ten agencies now earmark at least 2.5 percent of their extramural research budgets for SBIR grants, McInnis explained. The SBIR program has two government-funded phases, an initial phase up to $100,000 and a second, up to $750,000, in which additional moneys are provided when the research shows that the project will have private-sector or other government agency financing and viability, a so-called, “Follow-on Funding Commitment” (“FFC”). In the final phase SBIR grant recipients must secure the private or non-SBIR government funds. Lavid’s fraud occurred in both publicly funded phases.
The United States, through the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, formally joined the whistleblower suit with today’s filings. U.S. District Judge Dennis M. Cavanaugh received the Lavid’s Settlement Agreement today, according to McInnis, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice who concentrates in qui tam whistleblower cases brought under the FCA. “Qui tam” is a term derived from English Common Law meaning “he who sues on behalf of the king as well as himself.”