it please the court the usual issues concerning this case as i see them zero in on the fact that we have three false claim actions that are the subject of a contention of the part of the appellate that there has been prior disclosure on the one hand and on the other hand as a result of that the lower court made a finding in fact both lower courts have made a finding that the relator was not the original source of the information as a starting point i think it would be appropriate to clarify something that is not terribly evident from the briefing on both sides and to that extent i apologize for my side and that is the fact that at no time has anyone really laid out for the court specifically the issue concerning the identity of the contracts that were an issue in climate the number one  the benefit of the court although all three of these cases involve over three hundred different contracts not one of which is found in more than one case for example  think that well first of all first of all it's it's evident on the face of the pleadings in blimey he three and by mickey to the specific contracts are identified for example in by making number two the complaint asserts or were charges for services not performed on contracts involving southern california rehabilitation services the complaint alleges other charges for services not performed on excerpted record zero five six to zero six one she then proceeds to list fifty four different contracts by name and number with contractors such as numerous school districts stating which the lower court in the state agencies and i had the excerpted record from by mickey three would be five six zero six one the contract alleged and by making number three were totally different they involve different contracting parties and of course they were alleged to have occurred between the operative dates nine hundred ninety five and two thousand and one now if the court then refers to the excerpted record at page one sixty two to one sixty seven we have provided in the a list of the specific contracts that were involved in by making a number one which was it was reviewed by judge prager's and in the in his ruling on the twelve b motion in that particular there was a motion to strike on the on the on by making number two however these documents this particular documents are submitted to the court and were submitted to the lower court and by making number three not in by mickey two so counsel of course has moved to strike it from my mickey two because of course the two hundred forty seven contracts in vimy one which are different from the two or three that i've just related to your honor as having taken place and were played in by mickey number two were totally different this brings me i think to the very first point that i want to make and that is the fact that that in looking at this case in talking about the prior disclosure contextually the earlier litigations as raised by the appellants we have to focus on the transactional distinction that's required by the by the cases in the code there can be no public disclosure if the specific transactions are not alleged and there can be no prior disclosure if if not all of the defendants have the name indeed if you're looking at the three i've course decided to the augustine sun valley and sun our gasoline cases in our in our papers and i i would concede that the court there probably are obviously nuances of the of the circumstances but but the i think the critical point though that i'm trying to make is generalized allegations of fraud allegations of wrongful conduct does not constitute public knowledge what i'm saying is is that when there's been a specific recitation in the in the pleated shown in the contracts the dates the places the individuals that are involved and more specifically when i say the transactional nexus i'm talking about the actual act of the false claims you don't recover as the court knows for false claims violations by general allegations of fraud but rather by a showing that is part of the the issue is whether or not the contracts have been disclosed are they different contracts from one case to the next clearly there are from just a simple review of the complaints are the different date ranges involved clearly there are from from  the allegations in the complaint are the different individuals involved yes there are as you look go from one to the next the contention that the pelleas make however that the  public disclosure by nature of the matters that were sued upon in the earlier two cases the court will recognize that we contend is incorrect and that's an improper notion because there cannot be prior disclosure that cannot be prior disclosure if the earlier contract pseudopod were different contracts involving different people different dates each transaction your honour's could trigger any one of the number of different governmental regulations if you're alleging let's  so on and you make a general allegation of that kind of conduct and use it enough that you make that allegation and mannering that would cause a reasonable government and investigate and discover the things that are alleged later in the second that well the if i understand the question the  united states government placed on notice by the claim that this woman filed to them under seal prior to the opening of this lawsuit to place the government on notice of the need to investigate this further the answer would be yes but we haven't course if the once the court makes a determination that there has been a prior public disclosure then that triggers the second prong of the two prong test letters to determine whether or not the relator is the original source of the information so  disclosure in our belief unless the specific transactions have been shown in the prior cases and there's not necessarily public disclosure if all of the defendants named in the third case were not named in the second case and conversely in the first case there's there's if you're talking about a temporal overlap between the cases perhaps so but the actual contracts in blend of the two are not the same concepts as increase they are listed in the complaint and i do not have that praise reference from the excerpted record here in front of me it would be located within the copy of the i have been very s  those references i don't have it appear at the podium with me right now having said what i said the first argument that we make is that there was no prior disclosure identified proportions they places and time that they claim was was rendered in the year two thousand and that that in fact constitutes another form of public disclosure we can tell the that the audit argument is is purely a red herring both the california department of rehabilitation aleikum have submitted briefs here in the lower court that by making publicly disclosed her claims in the earlier cases both of which predate the audit by many many years talking i don't know if it was or not i the the audit itself information from the audit was asserted but the pelleas argue that it was posted on the internet there's no authentic no authentic ation as to the audit there's no there's no this case before judge gregersen so we have assessed the serious problem furthermore the audit itself does not constitute the kind of public disclosure that's been defined by the cases because it is not it is not the type of an administrative hearing well for example the penalties argue one of the cases they cite is the is the one case and the a one the a one case which is kind of an interesting case because in the   auditing activities and state disclosures do not qualify for public disclosure so given the state given the circumstances if a one it's a one that it would appear that the circuit would be tending to go with a  decision in terms of whether or not this audit would even qualify as a so called administrative hearing but there's no evidence of what it was that was one of our complaints about the audit information before the lower court there's no  anthropologist no not that i'm aware of not that i'm aware i'm not even sure the district court considered it because there was no declaration submitted in support of the information it was the statement made by counsel in their argument papers one of my problems with this case is the jurisdictional issues that are involved here because when the question of jurisdiction is dependent on the resolution of factual issues going to the merits i don't believe that the court this is not the proper proper place to be disposed of by the i think what i'll do i have two minutes left i will save my two minutes please the court if i may start with a clarification from the prior matter that was on the calendar before us which of course dealt with the public disclosure requirement in the original source requirement and if i may respectfully judge preside in a statement that if you regional source was not did not publicly disclose the transactions or allegations then they basically cannot say a friend say in fact i think has occurred some of the cases say a court excuse me a newspaper reporter then the newspaper reporter turns around and publishes a story in the new york times about the fraud occurring at a particular place now could that newspaper reporter turn around and sue because they publicly disclosed no why not because congress enacted the original source requirement to protect that insider that person's privy with direct employees an actual employee i believe it was at the mc corporation and not only was that person employee of the actual energy involved in the fraud but that employee actually had a hand in working on the bradley fighting  here let's say there's a department of rehabilitation employee and they have firsthand knowledge of suppose a fraudulent transactions and they tell a third person let's say charlotte blinding heat they were later in this right and i think i am gay and that is my segue to get back to the public disclosure and let me do that if i may with regard to public disclosure i think judge can't be previously addressed the key here that is that the real issue in a public disclosure is a well whether this particular contract is the same or there's an exact matching of time obviously it's clear that we've made clear t there's a lot the record comprehensive total record shows a lot more than that and in fact the most obvious you know but the most obvious example of public disclosure between blimey if you want to blame you too was the caption of blinded you to said a complaint to area and we're talking about third party cooperative agreements that is a very specific practice dealing with a very certain limited number of people that's why you see the same name surfacing actually the first complaint dealt with a  but if you look very specifically each of the type of the thing again the bottom line is was there enough that would tip off the federal government that this is what's going on we're talking a very limited type of practice that is third party cooperat agreements this thing about if you look specifically at all they talk about equipment in blimey the two well then they talked about i believe they were more general about third party contracts and blimey the three but they're still talking about the same type of practice fall to certification awarding contracts to friends of the department kickbacks it's called the kickback in one case but then it's called a bunco scheme somewhere i mean we're talking labels here but at the end of the day the practic underlying this whole ongoing thing is against the same people for the same practices which if the federal government was told about one transaction they would be able to go ok what's going on here but that really gets back identical kind of contact but if for two different claims submitted to the government to different here then i'd have to say i think it's speculative i would have to look at those contracts and then if we have those alleged then we could respond to them we don't have those what we do have complainant blimey he to talk about a completely different thing and frankly this talk about specific contract from the pellant is a little disingenuous and contradicted by their own pleading what did they say that opposition which was a test of blood to to complain they said we're talking about improprieties in grant state wide failure to mean into inventory account for equipment get bids not advertising in fact in that state or a brief they found that the per vas transactions at issue are sufficient to give the federal government notice to conduct an investigation into the practice of the bottom line issue is that if the federal government looked into that the transactions and blind  type of fund with a very small number of employees similar to harshman where i think we had a union which dealt with a very fine so give us another case give us the facts the most one probably go to the convicts for what they know because there's a limited number it's the same people the same department dealing with the same type of fun same type of service and service aspect different from if this kid if you look very closely at the matching of the allegations it's are i believe it is clear that that what yes that contracts with other energies for other purposes but we're talking about one part of their function with certain types of contracts which are administered by a limited group of people and this is talking about fairly failure to audit failure to maintain records so i'm going to be very easy for the federal government to go in and say we want to see all your records about third party contracts for vocational rehabilitation because these allegations of to the south that you're not doing it right i want to see all your records for years ninety one think that's ok as to whether or not it relies on it but certainly as to the grounds upon which the court will lie whether they are the prior publication one he wanted to do for the audit so long as the trial court's decision was correct in terms of actually covering i believe you're correct one of the there is a conflict but i think the logical issue here is whether or not the information that underlies the teton action has been made available to the government and issue of whether a specific contract is it is ego contract like contract or under harshman if you go by the scheme and the nature of the order to find anyone doing the audit found that there were some questionable issues as to the expenditure  the types of contracts that we are here at the that are here issue which are these cooperative agreements between the state and the county of los angeles or the state or the county office of education are called cooperative agreements and the audit specifically found that those were acceptable but it may be to great lengths to discuss what those were how they came about what they were if that was a wrongdoing clearly anyone looking at that audit could look at that and go that's review of that section and in fact given the congress's purpose in trying to avoid opportunistic plaintiffs such as miss fine again in this instance i think that that would be an inappropriate reading of the statute to limit it simply to u s congressional audit based effectively upon the public disclosure by the state auditor of a set of transactions if i may close both the d c circuit and the second circuit the d c circuit in the findlay matter the second circuit in the criminal matter i found specifically that the types of allegations that are brought to bear here are simply insufficient to establish that ms want to use an original source that goes beyond the issue of prior publication i grant you  would also point out the fact that before the lower court we asked for clarification from from the from the judge we asked for leave to amend our client submitted the declaration in great great detail that outlined to the judge gone to indicating that because of her prior employment with california rehab she had access to get in the door of all of these other different agencies look at the look at the agencies asian pacific treatment center portals away since house dubbed off center d d her cent because the because the courts are to determine that they don't have immunity that's why the crime there really well this this well the problem the problem words if you look at the chronology of what happened with the trial court we were faced with depositions and and suborning incorrect information in discovery is a fraud on the court and it's outside of the scope of the of the o a g representatives who are involved and that was the primary predicate upon which my client and that's why i think it's so important to recognize the fact that she listed that chapter and verse what she did over the years to uncover this information she left the agency she's going to have i don't i don't want to open all of this i