The False Claims Act of 1863 (FCA) is an American federal law that imposes liability on persons and companies who defraud governmental programs. It is the federal government's primary litigation tool in combating fraud against the government. The law includes a qui tam provision that allows people who are not affiliated with the government, called "relators" under the law, to file actions on behalf of the government. This is informally called "whistleblowing", especially when the relator is employed by the organization accused in the suit. Persons filing actions under the Act stand to receive a portion of any recovered damages.
State Farm Insurance is a group of mutual insurance companies throughout the United States with corporate headquarters in Bloomington, Illinois. Founded in 1922, it is the largest property, casualty, and auto insurance provider in the United States.
Kerri Rigsby and Cori Rigsby (Moran) are the American sisters who worked for eight years at E.A. Renfroe Company and were managers overseeing catastrophe claims adjusters. Kerri and Cori Rigsby are also the whistleblowers who proved to a Mississippi jury that State Farm committed fraud against the U.S. government. The sisters claim State Farm ignored or minimized wind damage to avoid payments relating to Hurricane Katrina and instead attributed damage to flooding so that the National Flood Insurance Program would cover the claims. The jury verdict was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, was then affirmed 8-0 by the United States Supreme Court. The Rigsbys were managers who worked in Gulfport, Mississippi for a subcontractor hired by State Farm to adjust wind and flood claims after Hurricane Katrina. They were the first to uncover a fraudulent scheme by State Farm to improperly categorize wind damage as flood damage. This mischaracterization was very important because State Farm had to pay for wind damage out of its own pocket under State Farm homeowner policies, while flood damage was paid by the federal government under FEMA's flood policies. Over the course of several months, the sisters amassed thousands of pages of documents related to State Farm's activities. The Rigsbys' landmark win was historic because they were the first to prove that an insurance company defrauded the government in FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program despite testimony by FEMA’s Executive Director that, after investigating the allegations, he personally didn’t believe that there was any fraud by State Farm, and he confirmed that FEMA had not asked State Farm to repay any money to the National Flood Insurance Program. However, according to court documents, the sisters took the documents without authorization. Their actions in regard to these documents is the subject of ongoing legal action. Eventually, their story went public when ABC's 20/20 show aired it in August 2006. In 2008, Judge Senter of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Mississippi found that the sisters and their attorneys had acted unethically when the Scruggs Katrina Group paid the sisters $150,000 per year each to testify, and barred them from testifying or using any of the documents that were taken. Scruggs was later forced to withdraw as their attorney because he improperly paid them for downloading and giving him the State Farm claims files and other documents to use in his lawsuits against State Farm. Scruggs also was later disbarred after pleading guilty to conspiracy to bribe a state circuit court judge in 2008 and separately, to improperly influence another state court circuit judge. He was sentenced to serve five years and seven years, to run concurrently, on the two guilty pleas.
Travelers Casualty & Surety Co. of America v. Pacific Gas & Elec. Co., 549 U.S. 443 (2007), was a United States Supreme Court case about attorney's fees in bankruptcy cases. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the opinion for a unanimous court.
Allison Engine Co. v. United States ex rel. Sanders, 553 U.S. 662 (2008), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States holding that plaintiffs under the False Claims Act must prove that the false claim was made with the specific intent of inducing the government to pay or approve payment of a false or fraudulent claim, rather than merely defrauding a contractor. Congress overruled this decision with the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009.
Polar Tankers, Inc. v. City of Valdez, 557 U.S. 1 (2009), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States involving the tonnage clause of the United States Constitution.
United States ex rel. Eisenstein v. City of New York, 556 U.S. 928 (2009), is a United States Supreme Court decision holding that where the Government has not intervened or actively participated, private plaintiffs under the False Claims Act must file an appeal within 30 days of the judgment or order being appealed, according to the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure.
New York ex rel. Cutler v. Dibble, 62 U.S. 366 (1858), was a companion case to the more well-known Fellows v. Blacksmith (1857). At the time Fellows was decided, this case had reached the U.S. Supreme Court but had not yet been argued.
Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), there have been numerous actions in federal courts to challenge the constitutionality of the legislation. They include challenges by states against the ACA, reactions from legal experts with respect to its constitutionality, several federal court rulings on the ACA's constitutionality, the final ruling on the constitutionality of the legislation by the U.S. Supreme Court in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, and notable subsequent lawsuits challenging the ACA. The Supreme Court upheld ACA for a third time in a June 2021 decision.
Navarette v. California, 572 U.S. 393 (2014), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court clarified when police officers may make arrests or conduct temporary detentions based on information provided by anonymous tips. In 2008, police in California received a 911 call that a pickup truck was driving recklessly along a rural highway. Officers spotted a truck matching the description provided in the 911 call and followed the truck for five minutes, but did not observe any suspicious behavior. Nevertheless, officers conducted a traffic stop and discovered 30 pounds (14 kg) of marijuana in the truck. At trial, the occupants of the car argued that the traffic stop violated the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution, because the tip was unreliable, and officers did not personally observe criminal activity. Writing for a majority of the Court, Justice Clarence Thomas held that the 911 call was reliable, and that officers need not personally observe criminal activity when acting upon information provided by an anonymous 911 call.
Dart Cherokee Basin Operating Co. v. Owens, 574 U.S. 81 (2015), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States clarified procedures for removing a class action lawsuit from state court to federal court. The case involved a dispute about revenue from oil and gas leases in which the defendant filed a motion to remove the case from a state court in Kansas to the United States District Court for the District of Kansas. However, the plaintiff argued that the defendant's motion was defective because the defendant's notice of removal did not include evidence demonstrating that the amount in controversy satisfied the jurisdictional threshold. The United States District Court for the District of Kansas ultimately ruled the case should be returned to the state court, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit declined to review the district court's decision.
Mullenix v. Luna, 577 U.S. ___ (2015), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that a police officer who shot a suspect during a police pursuit was entitled to qualified immunity. In a per curiam opinion, the Court held that prior precedent did not establish "beyond debate" that the officer's actions were objectively unreasonable.
Luis v. United States, 578 U.S. 5 (2016), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the pre-trial restraint of assets needed to retain a defendant's counsel of choice when those assets have not been used in conjunction with criminal activity.
Bank Markazi v. Peterson, 578 U.S. 212 (2016), was a United States Supreme Court case that found that a law which only applied to a specific case, identified by docket number, and eliminated all of the defenses one party had raised does not violate the separation of powers in the United States Constitution between the legislative (Congress) and judicial branches of government. The plaintiffs, in the case had initially obtained judgments against Iran for its role in supporting state-sponsored terrorism, particularly the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings and 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, and sought execution against a bank account in New York held, through European intermediaries, on behalf of Bank Markazi, the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The plaintiffs obtained court orders preventing the transfer of funds from the account in 2008 and initiated their lawsuit in 2010. Bank Markazi raised several defenses, including that the account was not an asset of the bank, but rather an asset of its European intermediary, under both New York state property law and §201(a) of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act. In response to concerns that existing laws were insufficient for the account to be used to settle the judgments, Congress added an amendment to a 2012 bill, codified after enactment as 22 U.S.C. § 8772, that identified the pending lawsuit by docket number, applied only to the assets in the identified case, and effectively abrogated every legal basis available to Bank Markazi to prevent the plaintiffs from executing their claims against the account. Bank Markazi then argued that § 8772 was an unconstitutional breach of the separation of power between the legislative and judicial branches of government, because it effectively directed a particular result in a single case without changing the generally applicable law. The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and, on appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit both upheld the constitutionality of § 8772 and cleared the way for the plaintiffs to execute their judgments against the account, which held about $1.75 billion in cash.
Heffernan v. City of Paterson, 578 U.S. ___ (2016), was a United States Supreme Court case in 2016 concerning the First Amendment rights of public employees. By a 6–2 margin, the Court held that a public employee's constitutional rights might be violated when an employer, believing that the employee was engaging in what would be protected speech, disciplines them because of that belief, even if the employee did not exercise such a constitutional right.
Campbell-Ewald Co. v. Gomez, 577 U.S. 153 (2016), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States clarified whether a case becomes moot when a party provides a settlement offer that satisfies a named plaintiff's claims in a class action suit and whether a government contractor is entitled to "derivative sovereign immunity".
Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, 578 U.S. 330 (2016), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court vacated and remanded a ruling by United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on the basis that the Ninth Circuit had not properly determined whether the plaintiff has suffered an "injury-in-fact" when analyzing whether he had standing to bring his case in federal court. The Court did not discuss whether "the Ninth Circuit’s ultimate conclusion — that Robins adequately alleged an injury in fact — was correct."
Foster v. Chatman, 578 U.S. ___ (2016), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the state law doctrine of res judicata does not preclude a Batson challenge against peremptory challenges if new evidence has emerged. The Court held the state courts' Batson analysis was subject to federal jurisdiction because "[w]hen application of a state law bar 'depends on a federal constitutional ruling, the state-law prong of the court’s holding is not independent of federal law, and our jurisdiction is not precluded,'" under Ake v. Oklahoma.
Kellogg Brown & Root Services, Inc. v. United States ex rel. Carter, 575 U.S. 650 (2015), was a United States Supreme Court involving KBR and a former KRB contractor, Benjamin Carter. In a unanimous opinion written by Associate Justice Samuel Alito, the Court held that Wartime Suspension of Limitations Act only applies to criminal offenses. The Court also held that qui tam lawsuits filed under the False Claims Act are no longer considered "pending" after they have been dismissed.
United States ex rel. Polansky v. Executive Health Resources, Inc., 599 U.S. ___ (2023), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that in a qui tam action filed under the False Claims Act, the United States may move to dismiss whenever it has intervened — whether during the seal period or later on. In assessing a motion to dismiss an FCA action over a relator's objection, district courts should apply Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 41(a), the rule generally governing voluntary dismissal of suits in ordinary civil litigation.
