TRENTON – Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal announced today a settlement with LexisNexis that resolves allegations LexisNexis underpaid law enforcement in New Jersey and elsewhere in connection with the purchase and resale of automobile crash reports.
Officials say the settlement is with three Lexis Nexis entities: LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Inc., LexisNexis Claims Solutions, Inc., and LexisNexis Coplogic Solutions, Inc.
Under contracts, it has with law enforcement agencies in New Jersey and other jurisdictions, LexisNexis has agreed to pay certain fees in return for obtaining access to reports on automobile crashes, which it then resells to insurance companies and others.
A cooperative investigation conducted by the states of New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts and Tennessee, as well as the City of Baltimore, focused on LexisNexis’s crash report sales activities from 2012 through May 2019.
The investigation found that, during that period, LexisNexis paid law enforcement agencies only for the first time it a sold crash report, but failed to report and pay for each subsequent transaction in which it resold the same report, as required by its contracts.
As a result, LexisNexis failed to pay law enforcement agencies in New Jersey and elsewhere fees they were legally entitled to receive officials said in a statement.
As part of the settlement, LexisNexis will pay the fees it previously evaded and will discontinue its fraudulent resale practices.
“Under this settlement, New Jersey will recover funds that should have been available to law enforcement, and LexisNexis will stop a practice that diverted this funding to the company’s own pockets,” said Attorney General Grewal.
The underreporting of sales and underpayment of contractual fees by LexisNexis violated New Jersey’s False Claims Act, as well as similar false claims statutes in the other participating jurisdictions.
Under terms of the settlement, LexisNexis must pay a total of approximately $5.8 million to the participating jurisdictions. Including legal fees, New Jersey’s share of the settlement is approximately $195,000, based on the number of false claims submitted to New Jersey law enforcement.
The settlement announced today and the multi-state investigation that led to it resulted from a qui tam or whistleblower lawsuit filed in federal court in Florida. The relator in the federal lawsuit, a former LexisNexis employee, will receive approximately $1.1 million for bringing the company’s misconduct to light.
Deputy Attorney General Zachary N. Klein from the Division of Law’s Government and Healthcare Fraud Section and Assistant Attorney General Jeremy Hollander from the Affirmative Civil Enforcement Practice Group represented the State in this matter.