(LEGAFI) -- The Department of Justice is investigating allegations made in a 2009 whistleblower lawsuit that national pain medication monitoring company Millennium Laboratories defrauded taxpayers through fraudulent billing practices.

The Millennium Laboratories whistleblower lawsuit alleges the San Diego company engaged in a conspiracy to defraud government health programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, by encouraging thousands of doctors and health care providers to bill for drug testing services that they didn’t provide, or which should have been billed at a lower rate. The government joins 14 states and the District of Columbia in looking into the whistleblower’s allegations.

The Millennium Laboratories lawsuit alleges the company has been conducting “a cleverly thought out scheme” that brings Millennium big profits and fills doctors’ wallets, making physicians essentially complicit in fraudulent urine-testing and medical billing. The lawsuit alleges Millennium encouraged physicians to bill the government for multiple tests, even when only one had been performed, as early as 2007, the year the company was founded. Millennium allegedly told doctors if they billed 20 tests a day their practice could earn $2.3 million a year.

The DOJ hasn’t formally joined the Millennium Laboratories whistleblower lawsuit, but it recently wrote in court documents that it continues to investigate the allegations. If the government joins a whistleblower lawsuit and reaches a settlement, the whistleblower stands to receive 15 to 25 percent of any money recovered. If the government declines to join the suit, the whistleblower can still pursue the case on his or her own.

The whistleblower in this case, Robert Cunningham, died last year. The lawsuit continues to be pursued by the law firm that represented Cunningham.