Officials of the U.S. government reported on Tuesday that three large pharmaceutical companies are willing to hand in an amount of 421 million dollars for reporting that drug prices have inflated.

The said companies are Abbott Laboratories, Roxan Laboratories and Braun Medical Inc. According to the Justice Department, the three drug companies have all agreed to pay the fines. Roxan Laboratories is a US-based subsidiary of a German firm while Braun Medical Inc is a German drug company.

These companies mentioned above have been accused of artificially inflating or ballooning the prices of the drugs that have been reimbursed by the federal government. These reimbursed drugs were under the Medicare and Medicaid health care programs for the low-income Americans and the elders.

The assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Division, Tony West, said these companies are considered guilty from selling the drugs at a certain price and then overly inflating them when reports are needed to be filed to the government who is going to pay for the drugs.

This has made the government pay too much reimbursement by nearly hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars, as according to the officials. West added that the pharmaceutical companies had created an incentive for their drug purchases, and then kept the difference from the prices they submitted.

However, some authorities claimed that they have already recovered the overcharges and even more from the settlements with the three companies from their unlawful pricing plots. The officials further stated that they have already reclaimed over nine billion U.S. dollars in such cases of false claims. Half of these funds came from fraud in connection to federal health care programs.

According to West, the scams of price inflation are considered as a drain on the government treasury and negatively affect the health programs which are designed for the elderly and sick people.