Feb. 17—The term “whistleblower” make evoke images of a person willing to risk everything, including their livelihood, to keep a government agency or contractor on the straight and narrow.

But filing a whistleblower or qui tam lawsuit can also be a lucrative endeavor — if it’s successful.

In the case of Jacob Kuriyan, in the midst of a lawsuit alleging abuse of the False Claims Act by four health care companies in New Mexico, it is, in a way, an extension of his business model: approaching companies or government agencies with an offer to analyze data to find ways to save or recover lost money. In Kuriyan’s case, he filed the federal lawsuit after the state government disputed his work was the impetus behind the recovery of more than $221 million from four companies that manage Medicaid care in New Mexico.

Kuriyan continues to assert the state should be recovering more money — and he’s owed a portion.

Here’s a little more about how these sorts of lawsuits work.

What’s the origin of whistleblower laws?

In U.S. legal history, the 1863 advent of whistleblower lawsuits dates to a Civil War-era swindle.

“What happened was an entrepreneur was buying defective guns from the Union Army and then reselling them back to the Union Army as if they were new guns, which is obviously a very dangerous thing to do,” said Alan Grayson, Kuriyan’s attorney and a national specialist in whistleblower lawsuits and government contracts.

Then-President Abraham Lincoln and his government didn’t have the bandwidth to simultaneously fight a war and deal with the bad actors.

“So they basically deputized whistleblowers to bring lawsuits in cases where the government had been overcharged or cheated involving the procurements,” Grayson said.

The law has evolved greatly in the last 160 years, but False Claim Act suits work “pretty much the same way today as it did back then,” Grayson said.

How do False Claim Act lawsuits work?

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“The gist of it is that you can file a lawsuit in federal court and now in more than 30 state courts,” Grayson said. “That lawsuit says that you have information that … the government has been cheated.”

One relatively recent change is the concept of a “reserve False Claim Act” case, which essentially asserts people illegally holding onto government money or property also constitutes a violation, Grayson said.

Whistleblowers who help save or recover government money are entitled to 15% to 30%, Grayson said.

In Kuriyan’s case, he’s filing a lawsuit on behalf of the U.S. against the four companies as a “relator” who has a financial interest in the case.

What is the government’s role?

False Claims Act lawsuits typically are filed under seal, which allows the government to investigate the defendant without tipping them off for some period of time, Grayson said. Government agencies then decide whether they want to get involved in a hands-on way with the case.

If they do choose to get involved, the whistleblower typically works hand-in-hand with the government to get to the bottom of the allegations.

Grayson said if government agencies choose not to get involved, it doesn’t necessarily doom the case — but it does lessen the chance of success.

Is that the only kind of whistleblower lawsuit?

No. Whistleblowers can also file claims involving allegations of securities fraud and of tax fraud. States vary on their laws around whistleblower lawsuits, and on their protections for whistleblowers.

Who is best positioned to be a whistleblower?

In Grayson’s opinion, that would be “people who work for companies that cheat the government.”

Bureaucrats also sometimes act as whistleblowers, but Grayson said it’s somewhat discouraged by the the government itself “because the government says they’re supposed to do it as part of their job to pursue waste, fraud and abuse.”

Grayson said in his experience, Kuriyan is somewhat unusual, though not unique, as an outsider who worked neither for a contractor nor a government agency before filing a whistleblower lawsuit. But technically, any person can file a whistleblower action.

“In theory, you can see fraud happening on the street somewhere,” Grayson said. “[It’s] simply somebody who knows that the government’s being cheated.”