Recently, a Georgia federal district court permitted an employer’s counterclaims against its former employee-whistleblower to proceed in a False Claims Act (“FCA”) lawsuit after determining that the employer’s amended counterclaims for breach of fiduciary duty and breach of contract were sufficiently independent from the underlying FCA claims to survive a motion to dismiss, despite significant factual overlap. The decision in U.S. ex rel. Cooley v. ERMI, LLC, et al.., a qui tam FCA action where the plaintiff, known as a “Relator,” brings the claim on behalf of the ...
By: Stuart M. Gerson
On May 16, 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the case of Schindler Elevator Corp. v. United States ex rel. Kirk (pdf), holding that the public disclosure bar of the False Claims Act (FCA) is triggered by a federal agency’s written response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. This important, and much awaited, decision makes it clear that an agency’s FOIA response constitutes a “report” for purposes of the FCA’s public disclosure bar, which forecloses private parties from bringing qui tam whistleblower suits to recover falsely or ...
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