Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey wrote a check for $100 million to the state last year, and it wasn’t for a donation. It was the price of settling allegations that the insurer overcharged the state and misled officials to land a contract administering health benefits for New Jersey’s own public employees. That single case did more than headline the state’s 2025 civil enforcement tally. It set the tone for a year in which New Jersey’s Attorney General’s Office pulled in $193 million through settlements spanning healthcare fraud, chemical contamination, labor violations, consumer scams, and real estate misconduct, according to figures released by the office in late July.
That number, notable on its own, is also incomplete by design. State officials have been explicit that the $193 million figure reflects only the settlements and court orders the state itself obtained. It does not capture the separate relief that flowed directly to victims in some of these cases, things like debt forgiveness, balance write-offs, and restitution payments that never show up in the state’s own recovery ledger but still landed in the pockets of the New Jerseyans who were harmed. And it excludes an entire category of settlements still working their way through the courts, including a set of proposed PFAS agreements with 3M, DuPont, Chemours, and Corteva that together carry a price tag north of $2.5 billion. If those deals receive court approval, they will dwarf every recovery on last year’s list combined.
A Step Down From Record Years, But Not a Slowdown
Context matters here, and the trend line tells an interesting story. New Jersey pulled in nearly $430 million in 2024 and $600 million in 2023, years that were inflated by a handful of enormous, multistate resolutions: the national opioid litigation, sweeping PFAS settlements, and the Ørsted offshore wind agreement, all reached under former Attorney General Matthew Platkin. Measured against those totals, $193 million looks like a step down. But a single year of blockbuster litigation settling out doesn’t mean the enforcement machine slowed down. It means the enormous, headline-grabbing cases that inflated 2023 and 2024 simply weren’t there in 2025, while the underlying casework, the healthcare fraud investigations, the consumer protection actions, the labor violation cases, kept grinding forward at a steady clip.
There’s a second number worth putting next to the $193 million recovered: the $189 million New Jersey itself paid out last year in litigation settlements and judgments against the state, up from $177.9 million in 2024. Governments get sued too, and that figure is a reminder that the state’s legal exposure runs in both directions. New Jersey collected more than it paid out in 2025, but not by the wide margin recent years might suggest, and that narrower gap is worth watching as future totals come in.
Where the Money Actually Came From
The Horizon settlement anchors the list, but the rest of the top recoveries paint a fuller picture of where New Jersey’s enforcement attention has been focused. Solvay and Arkema agreed to pay close to $34 million and commit to remediation work resolving PFAS contamination tied to their West Deptford facility, continuing the state’s aggressive posture on so-called forever chemicals even outside the pending multibillion-dollar cases still awaiting approval. Lyft settled for $19.4 million over allegations that it misclassified drivers as independent contractors, cutting them off from sick leave and other protections New Jersey law guarantees to employees, a case that sits squarely inside the broader national fight over how gig economy companies classify their workforces.
Mercedes-Benz paid more than $11 million as part of a multistate settlement addressing consumer fraud and environmental claims tied to diesel emissions defeat devices, the kind of case that echoes the Volkswagen emissions scandal from the previous decade and shows that litigation over engineered emissions cheating still hasn’t fully worked its way out of the courts. Smaller but no less telling recoveries rounded out the list: a $2.2 million judgment against Financial Services for America over a mortgage relief scheme that targeted homeowners already facing foreclosure, a $1.7 million commitment from North Wildwood toward beach replenishment and environmental restoration after years of litigation over unauthorized dune work, a $1.7 million judgment against ADS Renovation Group for consumer protection violations in home improvement contracting, a $1.67 million bankruptcy claim the Division of Taxation secured against Presperse Corp. for unpaid state tax liabilities, and a $1.5 million settlement with MV Realty over a controversial program that traded upfront cash payments to homeowners for long-term, exclusive rights to list their properties.
Taken individually, none of those smaller cases move the needle much against a $193 million total. Taken together, they show an enforcement operation working across an unusually wide field: insurance, environmental contamination, gig labor, auto emissions, mortgage relief scams, coastal development, home improvement fraud, tax collection, and real estate practices, all in a single year, all producing real dollars recovered for the state and, in many cases, real relief for the residents harmed.
The PFAS Numbers Still to Come
The pending $2.5 billion in proposed PFAS settlements with 3M, DuPont, Chemours, and Corteva deserves its own attention, separate from the 2025 tally, precisely because of how large it is relative to everything else on the list. PFAS, the family of synthetic “forever chemicals” used for decades in manufacturing, has become one of the defining environmental liability stories of this era, and New Jersey, home to a dense cluster of chemical manufacturing history, has positioned itself among the most aggressive states in pursuing accountability for the contamination those chemicals left behind in soil and drinking water. When and if those settlements clear court approval, they will not just dwarf the $193 million recovered in 2025. They will likely dwarf the combined totals of 2023 and 2024 as well, reshaping how this entire multiyear enforcement stretch gets remembered.
The People Behind the Numbers
Jennifer Davenport, who has served as New Jersey’s acting attorney general since January of this year, framed the 2025 results as evidence of sustained commitment rather than a single standout year. She credited the attorneys within the Division of Law for defending state residents against consumer fraud, environmental harm, and financial scams, and said the office intends to keep pressing those cases in court to protect New Jerseyans from practices that raise costs and undermine community safety.
Division of Law Director Michael Walters offered a similar assessment, pointing to the roughly 500 attorneys and legal staff inside his division who work through what he described as thousands of active matters each year, each one aimed at securing the best possible outcome for the state, whether that means winning a recovery or defending against a claim brought against it. That volume, thousands of matters moving simultaneously through one division, is easy to lose sight of when the conversation centers on a handful of nine and ten figure settlements. It’s also the more accurate picture of what civil enforcement in New Jersey actually looks like day to day: less a string of blockbuster wins and more a continuous, high volume operation that occasionally produces a Horizon-sized headline and, this year, is still waiting on a PFAS reckoning that could make everything recovered so far look small by comparison.
