Dive Brief:
- The US Securities and Exchange Commission is currently investigating whether employees of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services engaged in illegal insider trading by siphoning information to Wall Street traders. The SEC is investigating three overlapping cases and the Federal Bureau of Investigation is involved in one of these.
- According to Wall Street Journal sources, the investigation has involved interviews of almost a dozen CMS officials and subpoenas of policy research firms, Wall Street traders and federal government officials.
- While the securities regulations surrounding insider trading on information from publicly-held companies are explicit, the rules for governmental agencies are murkier. Should any formal charges be brought, it would be "one of the first cases to test whether one of the ways information is exchanged in Washington violates insider-trading law," said the Wall Street Journal.
Dive Insight:
The three investigations are looking into: whether CMS officials alerted the policy research firm Marwood Group about the agency's review of Provenge, a prostate cancer treatment owned by Dendreon Corp; the circumstances surrounding former CMS employee David Blaszczak's many accurate predictions about Medicare medical product payments; and whether non-public information regarding an April 2013 agency announcement about 2014 reimbursement rates was leaked, and if that information was used in any insider trading deals.