WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court on Thursday revived two cases filed by supermarket whistleblowers who say that SuperValu and Safeway fraudulently reported drug prices to get bigger reimbursements from the government.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the unanimous court's opinion siding with the whistleblowers, who argued in April that both grocery chains seem to have known their price reporting was wrong when they sent it in to the government, a clear violation of the False Claims Act.
“It is enough if respondents believed that their claims were not accurate,” Thomas wrote in the 17-page opinion.
When a federal judge entered summary judgment for SuperValu, he did not dispute that store had misreported the drug prices. Because of some ambiguity in price-reporting requirements, however, the district court determined that that such misreporting could be chalked up to an objectively reasonable misunderstanding.
Pharmacist whistleblowers Tracy Schutte and Michael Yarberry, who could recover three times whatever the government paid because of fraud, appealed to the Supreme Court after a divided Seventh Circuit panel ruled against them. Tejinder Singh, an attorney with Sparacino, represented the SuperValu pharmacists and former Safeway pharmacist Thomas Proctor.
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