Stephen S. Hasegawa

Fraud against the government does not always look like a bill. Sometimes it looks like a shipping container, a pipe fitting, or a line in a tariff schedule. Stephen S. Hasegawa has spent his career at Phillips & Cohen following public loss into the places where it is most easily overlooked, supply chains, product specifications, import classifications, government-pricing arrangements, and proving that false claims hide as readily in the movement of goods and duties as in medical billing. It is a deliberately contrarian portfolio. The whistleblower bar clusters around pharmaceutical marketing and hospital coding because that is where the precedents are thickest; Hasegawa’s docket keeps demonstrating that the False Claims Act reaches wherever a company’s representation determines what the public receives or what the government collects, whether the representation concerns a diagnosis, a duty rate, or the tensile strength of a part buried under a city street.

The border as a crime scene

His customs work makes the point most vividly. On September 28, 2020, Linde GmbH and Linde Engineering North America agreed to pay $22.8 million to resolve a whistleblower suit, brought by Hasegawa, alleging that the companies had evaded customs duties on imported goods, a case in which the Treasury’s loss occurred not in any claims-processing system but at the border, where the goods entered the country under representations about their classification and value. Customs cases invert the statute’s usual geometry: instead of a false statement inflating what the government pays out, the falsehood shrinks what the government takes in, and the decisive evidence sits in sourcing, valuation, and classification records rather than in any ordinary request for payment. “When companies don’t pay the duties that are owed on imported goods,” he said when the settlement was announced, “they are breaking the law and also giving foreign manufacturers an unfair price advantage over American-made goods.” Hasegawa has become one of the field’s recognized authorities on that theory. On November 7, 2025, he taught advanced customs-fraud strategies and emerging issues to the whistleblower bar at the Anti-Fraud Coalition’s twenty-fifth annual conference, at a moment when tariff enforcement had moved to the center of American trade policy and the duties evaded by importers had never meant more to the public fisc.

Pipes, paper, and the price the public pays

The same instinct for overlooked fraud runs through the rest of his record. In litigation over substandard water-distribution parts, Hasegawa’s work contributed to $60 million in recoveries and three appellate victories, a matter that tied product quality to the certifications made when the parts were sold, so that the physical condition of components destined for public water systems became central to the government’s decision to pay. Defective-product cases are among the hardest in False Claims Act practice, demanding engineering proof on top of the usual evidentiary burdens, and the appellate wins preserved theories that other whistleblowers now build on. In the Office Depot case he represented whistleblowers in a $68.5 million resolution of claims that the company overcharged California cities, counties, and other public agencies on office supplies: pricing fraud at retail scale, spread invisibly across thousands of small transactions that no single purchasing officer could have seen whole.

Health care occupies its share of the docket, approached with the same structural eye. Hasegawa was counsel in the $75 million Community Health Systems settlement, a case about the manipulation of indigent-care funding, donations engineered to draw down public health-care dollars, and in a related $12.2 million resolution with Christus Hospital and St. Vincent Regional Medical Center over the same species of program manipulation. He helped represent whistleblowers in the $32.5 million Freedom Health and Optimum Healthcare matter, a Medicare Advantage case concerning beneficiaries’ access to care, and in the $39.5 million ResMed resolution of kickback allegations that consolidated five separate whistleblower cases. He now serves as co-counsel in the pending Medicare Advantage risk-adjustment litigation against UnitedHealth Group, one of the most consequential health-care fraud cases in the federal courts.

From securities defense to the relator’s side

Hasegawa came to whistleblower work by an unusual road. After graduating with honors from the University of Chicago Law School, where he served as articles editor of the University of Chicago Legal Forum, he spent eight years at Irell & Manella in Los Angeles on securities litigation, SEC inquiries, internal investigations, and complex commercial disputes. Those years inside sophisticated corporate litigation left him fluent in the way large corporate defendants protect themselves: the privilege architecture, the expert wars, the war-of-attrition discovery strategy. At Phillips & Cohen he turned that fluency around and put it in service of the individuals who take those defendants on. He has described the firm’s posture with typical economy: a small firm very successful at handling big cases, accustomed to dealing with giant, well-funded defense firms. He now serves as the firm’s general counsel in addition to his practice, the lawyer other lawyers at one of the nation’s leading whistleblower firms trust with their own hardest questions, and firm teams he served on were finalists for the Consumer Attorneys of California’s Consumer Attorney of the Year.

His writing carries the practice’s ideas outward: on litigation funding’s threat to False Claims Act integrity in Law360, on confidentiality agreements that must not be allowed to protect crimes in The Wall Street Journal, on whistleblower rewards as an enforcement tool in Forbes and Private Funds Management, and, in the Montreal Gazette, an argument that Quebec’s securities regulator should pay whistleblowers too.

What the public actually receives

Strip away the industries and Hasegawa is asking a single question in every case: did the public get what it paid for, and collect what it was owed? A water system deserves parts that meet specification; a school district deserves the contract price it was promised; Medicare deserves risk scores that reflect real patients and networks that deliver real care; the Treasury deserves the duties the tariff schedule commands. Protecting public funds in those places takes counsel able to move through procurement rules, trade obligations, and product specifications with the same care others bring to diagnostic codes. Most fraud there is never seen at all; it takes an insider to notice and a particular kind of lawyer to prove. Hasegawa has organized a career around being that lawyer, making fraud enforceable wherever a company’s representation determines what the public receives, or what the government collects.