Jon Oberg, while working at the Department of Education as a researcher, discovered illegal payments to student loan lenders of federal tax dollars that department officials instructed him not to investigate. On his own time, he researched the payments and reported them to Congress, which in 2004 ended the payments prospectively, saving billions of dollars. In 2007, Oberg sued the recipients under the False Claims Act. Three years later, the Department of Justice announced it had settled four of the cases for over $57 million.
