When Paul Bley ’80 graduated from University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1977 with a bachelor’s in business administration and a looming ROTC military obligation, he figured that having a law degree in hand would improve the flexibility and variety of his assignments in the U.S. Army.
As it turns out, flexibility and variety have been hallmarks of his career ever since.
After serving for five years as a commissioned officer with the Judge Advocate General’s Corps in the U.S. Army Military District of Washington, Bley satisfied his urge to travel by spending two years in Frankfurt, Germany, as a civilian lawyer for the Army. He began by providing legal assistance to service members and their families, but soon took up administrative and labor law as well.
Returning to the U.S. in 1987, Bley became an assistant general counsel at the Defense Contract Audit Agency, which audits defense contractors and other government agencies like NASA to ensure their contract costs are fair and reasonable. (The agency’s motto: “Supporting the warfighter. Protecting the taxpayer.”) The agency’s emphasis on accounting was a major draw: Bley double-majored in accounting and information systems analysis and design as an undergraduate and had originally intended to become a CPA.
In 2001, Bley switched gears yet again and became an associate general counsel at the Defense Health Agency (DHA), which manages the delivery of health services to all branches of the military. At the time, the agency had 12 attorneys on staff, and Bley found himself handling almost everything but contract law and questions regarding benefits. Now the agency employs hundreds of lawyers, and Bley is a principal keeper of its institutional memory — so much so that his boss even had the word “legend” inscribed on Bley’s office door nameplate.
Bley’s initial task at the DHA was to draft regulations for the agency’s implementation of the HHS HIPAA Privacy Rule, which established the first national standards to protect patient health information. The project took two years.
“It was scary at times,” Bley recalled. “I had written regulations before, but fairly short ones. And now I was being called upon to write a regulation over 100 pages in length, and working with representatives from the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and the Coast Guard.”
Currently, Bley focuses on supporting qui tam or false claims actions. Under the qui tam provision of the False Claims Act, private citizens can file suit on behalf of the federal government against people who have committed fraud against it. Bley has helped U.S. attorneys across the country pursue qui tam actions against medical providers who have defrauded the DHA through various schemes, like taking kickbacks for prescribing drugs and medical devices to patients they have never even seen. The amounts recovered range from thousands of dollars to more than a billion, and the money goes to provide care for the DHA’s 9.6 million beneficiaries.
“Our budgets are tight, and we use the recoveries to do things we could not otherwise do,” Bley said.
The work allows Bley to collaborate with — and learn from — colleagues in the DHA’s Office of the Inspector General and its Program Integrity Division, as well as the Departments of Justice and Labor and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service. He’s constantly being asked questions he’s never heard before — which is precisely how he likes it.
“I don’t know how I could continue if I was working on the same issue every day,” he said.
By Alexander Gelfand