U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling. State House News Service photo

The District of Massachusetts collected more than $5.2 billion in criminal and civil actions in fiscal year 2018, according to a statement from U.S. Attorney Andrew E. Lelling yesterday.

Of this amount, more than $4.9 billion was collected by the district alone, more than $25 million in criminal actions and more than $4.9 billion in civil actions. 

The District of Massachusetts also worked with other U.S. Attorney’s Offices and components of the Department of Justice to collect an additional roughly $282.2 million in cases pursued jointly.

As a whole, the Justice Department collected nearly $15 billion in civil and criminal actions in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2018. The roughly $14.8 billion in collections in fiscal 2018 represents nearly seven times the appropriated $2.13 billion budget for the 94 U.S. Attorneys’ Offices.

In addition to these civil and criminal collections, the District of Massachusetts was also responsible for the forfeiture of roughly $20.7 million in criminal proceeds, or other property involved in crimes, in fiscal 2018.

“I’m proud of the work the prosecutors in my office have done to secure more than $5 billion in civil and criminal collections, and asset forfeitures, in 2018 alone,” Lelling said in a statement. “The District of Massachusetts has long been a leader in financial recoveries in the areas of health care fraud, securities fraud and civil settlements, and we will continue to aggressively pursue collections that return money to victims of crime and U.S. taxpayers, and that deprive criminals of their ill-gotten gains.”

The District of Massachusetts announced in August a $4.9 billion settlement with the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, which was the largest penalty ever imposed on a single entity by the Justice Department for financial crisis-era misconduct.

The largest civil collections were from affirmative civil enforcement cases, in which the United States recovered government money lost to fraud or other misconduct or collected fines imposed on individuals and/or corporations for violations of federal health, safety, civil rights or environmental laws or fines for other fraudulent conduct. In addition, civil debts were collected on behalf of several federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Internal Revenue Service, the Small Business Administration and the Department of Education.