For the fortunate few, exposing corruption can be their winning lottery ticket.

Since 1986, more than $20 billion has been paid out in fraud lawsuits brought by whistleblowers.

It has made some midlevel bureaucrats very rich.

“I admit it: The money also did help,” said John Schilling, an accountant cum government witness who helped expose massive Medicare fraud by the hospital chain Columbia HCA.

Schilling and another whistleblower shared a $100 million reward for their efforts.

“I can also be proud to my own family — my own kids — and show that I didn’t succumb to peer pressure,” he said. “I did the right thing.”

On Friday, President Barack Obama signed legislation making it easier to bring whistleblower suits and expanding definitions of fraud. That expanded a law that has been on the books since the Civil War, and was enhanced in 1986.

Under the False Claims Act, the government can recover treble the amount of fraud. The so-called “qui tam” provisions of the law give whistleblowers — called “relators” — up to one-quarter of the recovery.

Settlements and judgments from the act have become staggering.

“You used to get a multimillion dollar settlement and that was a big deal. Now the pharmaceutical cases are literally in the billions,” said Rudolph Contreras, a prosecutor who handles civil litigation for the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C.

It’s growing in other areas, too.

In March, lawyers at Ashcraft & Gerel announced a $128 million settlement with Network Appliance Inc., which was accused of skirting its “best prices” promise in its contract with the U.S. General Services Administration.

The settlement — a record for GSA — paid Rockville analyst Igor Kapuscinski more than $19 million for exposing the fraud.

“A lot of the time the relators are insiders who know things that we wouldn’t find out about,” Contreras said.

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