Grassley Reminds Supreme Court Nominee of the Importance of False Claims Act

Mary Jane Wilmoth

Published On: March 24th, 2017

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearing for President Trump’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court began on Monday. Sen. Chuck Grassley, Chairman of the Committee and long-time advocate of whistleblower rights, brought the issue of the False Claims Act (FCA) to Nominee Judge Neil Gorsuch’s attention.

Sen. Grassley said he wanted to bring up the FCA so Judge Gorsuch would understand how important it is to him. He conveyed that many times when FCA cases come before the Supreme Court, “the Supreme Court gets this wrong.” He explained that the FCA statute has had to be rewritten to bring it back to what Congress intended, a law “to empower qui tam relaters, or whistleblower, to help the government identify and prosecute fraud on the tax payers.”

“The False Claims Act is the most effective anti-trust tool that we have. And since the 1986 amendments that Congressman Berman, then a member of the House and I was a member of the Senate, got passed; the taxpayers have recovered more than $53 billion in public funds lost to fraud,” Sen. Grassley continued.

Judge Gorsuch indicated that he was very familiar with FCA cases and he had presided over them in the past. When Sen. Grassley asked if Judge Gorsuch had ruled in favor of the relator, he responded “the one I have in mind, the little guy won that one.”

Sen. Grassley closed his discussion of the FCA telling Judge Gorsuch, “I hope you know how important this rule has been for the protection of the treasury against fraud, and I’m certainly very passionate about this issue. So, I think if the false claims act comes up, I hope you’ll remember whether I’m alive or dead, that Senator Grassley is interested in this.”

The FCA, enacted 1863, was modernized in 1986 when Sen. Grassley authored amendments to the qui tam provision of the law. The qui tam provisions allow lawsuits to be filed, by private citizens, against government contractors alleging false claims on behalf of the government. The whistleblower is eligible to receive up to 30 percent of the monies recovered, in a case where the government prevails.

Whistleblowers filed 702 qui tam suits in fiscal year 2016, and the Department recovered $2.9 billion in these and earlier filed suits this past year. Whistleblowers were awarded $519 million by the government in 2016. From January 2009 to the end of fiscal year 2016, the government recovered nearly $24 billion in settlements and judgments related to qui tam suits and paid more than $4 billion to whistleblowers.

More information about the False Claims Act: