On June 1, 2023, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision in United States ex rel. Schutte v. SuperValu Inc., rejecting efforts to redefine the knowledge prong of the False Claims Act to disregard a defendant’s subjective knowledge or belief.
The decision will have far-reaching impacts for companies dealing with ambiguous regulatory regimes or government contract provisions.
The False Claims Act, or FCA, codified at 31 U.S.C. §§ 3729–3733, imposes civil liability on anyone who, among other things, knowingly presents to the federal government a false or fraudulent claim for payment. The FCA’s “scienter” requirement ensures that punishment only be meted out to defendants who present false claims knowingly, which is defined to cover actual knowledge, “deliberate ignorance” of the truth or falsity of information, and “reckless disregard” of the truth or falsity of information.
The FCA is frequently employed in the area of health care reimbursement and defense contracting. The FCA has been described as a “quasi-criminal” statute because it imposes damages that the Supreme Court has described as “essentially punitive in nature”: treble damages awards, per-claim civil penalties (currently $13,507 to $27,018 per violation) and attorney’s fees.
The statute allows private citizens to bring civil actions in the name of the United States for enforcement of the FCA and provides that such “qui tam” litigants (“qui tam” is short for a...
The Archdiocese of Malta on Monday categorically rejects the false and misleading claims published by The Shift News in an article titled 'Anger within Curia over costly conversion of ODZ farmhous...