Opinion ID: 745387
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Is the GPR a Public Disclosure?

Text: 66 Our only remaining task then is to determine whether the County's 1992 GPR constitutes a public disclosure within the meaning of § 3730(e)(4)(A). Neither party focussed on this issue; 13 instead, both litigants concentrate on identifying the elements of the alleged fraudulent transactions, under the apparent assumption that the GPR effected a public disclosure under the potentially available standard developed by this Court in Stinson, 944 F.2d at 1157-60. Indeed, the district court shared this view of the GPRs in its simple conclusion that [t]he omission of the Penza Fund from annual GPRs disclosed the County's alleged failure to report the proceeds to HUD as program income. Dunleavy, 1996 WL 392545, at  3. We believe, however, that this aspect of the case merits more attention than it has been given. 67 To answer the question whether a certain fact has been publicly disclosed, we must make two distinct inquiries. The first is to ask whether the source is one recognized by the Act. The second posits whether the extent of disclosure is sufficient to support the conclusion that the information contained therein is now public within the meaning of the Act. Stinson supports this division of our exploration. 944 F.2d at 1154-60. In Stinson, we also undertook a two-part inquiry. We first examined whether the term civil ... hearing as used in § 3730(e)(4)(A) encompassed documents produced by a litigant but not filed with the court as part of discovery proceedings during civil litigation. Id. at 1154-57. Upon concluding that the statute did indeed contemplate this aspect of litigation as a source, we next determined to what extent the disclosure must be made public before the jurisdictional bar is invoked. Id. at 1157-60. 68 Similarly, we will first consider whether a GPR represents a source of disclosure contemplated by Congress in drafting the jurisdictional bar. Section 3730(e)(4)(A) identifies the following sources for disclosures: a criminal, civil, or administrative hearing, ... a congressional, administrative, or Government Accounting Office report, hearing, audit, or investigation, or ... the news media.... The prevailing view is that this list constitutes an exhaustive rendition of the possible sources. We agree. As explained by the Eleventh Circuit, we may safely assume that Congress knew what it was doing when it crafted the FCA: 69 The list of methods of public disclosure is specific and is not qualified by words that would indicate that they are only examples of the types of public disclosure to which the jurisdictional bar would apply. Congress could easily have used such as or for example to indicate that its list was not exhaustive. Because it did not, however, we will not give the statute a broader effect than that which appears in its plain language. 70 United States ex rel. Williams v. NEC Corp., 931 F.2d 1493, 1499-1500 (11th Cir.1991); see also United States ex rel. Fine v. Advanced Sciences, Inc., 99 F.3d 1000, 1004 (10th Cir.1996) (holding that § 3730(e)(4)(A) defines the sources of allegations and transactions which trigger the bar but ... does not define the only means by which public disclosure can occur); United States ex rel. Doe v. John Doe Corp., 960 F.2d 318, 323 (2d Cir.1992) (Section 3730(e)(4)(A) furnishes an exclusive list of the ways in which a public disclosure must occur for the jurisdictional bar to apply.); United States ex rel. LeBlanc v. Raytheon Co., Inc., 913 F.2d 17, 20 (1st Cir.1990) ( Section 3730(e)(4)(A) does not deny jurisdiction over actions based on disclosures other than those specified....). 71 The only way to bring the GPR, prepared by the County, within the language of § 3730(e)(4)(A) is for the GPR to be considered an administrative ... report. It is unlikely that Congress intended the public disclosure bar to be invoked without limitation as to the content or source of such administrative reports. Indeed, we conclude that Congress was not referring to administrative reports produced by non-federal government sources. 72 As we determined in our review of the FCA in Stinson, we find that Congress gave us little specific guidance to determine the scope of public disclosure sources, including administrative reports. It is noteworthy, however, that the terms report, hearing, audit, or investigation are modified by the words congressional, administrative, or Government Accounting Office. The word administrative is capable of many meanings. Congress has provided no clear legislative intent or meaning for it in the FCA. We will, therefore, turn to the doctrine of noscitur a sociis, which permits us to treat this word as one which gathers its meaning from the words around it. Jarecki v. G.D. Searle & Co., 367 U.S. 303, 307, 81 S.Ct. 1579, 1582, 6 L.Ed.2d 859 (1961); In re Continental Airlines, Inc., 932 F.2d 282, 288 (3d Cir.1991); 2A Sutherland Statutory Construction § 47:16 (5th ed.1992). The application of this doctrine is especially appropriate where, as here, a word is capable of many meanings in order to avoid the giving of unintended breadth to the Acts of Congress. Jarecki, 367 U.S. at 307, 81 S.Ct. at 1582. 73 Our reliance upon this maxim leads to the conclusion that administrative when read with the word report refers only to those administrative reports that originate with the federal government. We take notice of the fact that Congress and the Government Accounting Office are entities of our federal government. We find it hard to believe that the drafters of this provision intended the word administrative to refer to both state and federal reports when it lies sandwiched between modifiers which are unquestionably federal in character. 74 Moreover, a narrow reading of the phrase administrative ... report does not risk the arbitrary results that motivated our decision in Stinson. There we expressed concern that the crabbed interpretation of the word hearing proposed by the relator might produce a situation where the jurisdictional question turned on whether a judge was present at a given deposition. Stinson, 944 F.2d at 1157. Here, in contrast, we have good reasons to treat reports made by the federal government differently from those produced by state or local governments or by private individuals. Ordinarily, the party accused of defrauding the federal government is in control of most of the sources of information that would effectively reveal wrongdoing. This information dynamic was, in large part, a motivating factor behind the 1986 amendments. Congress emphasized its belief that [d]etecting fraud is usually very difficult without the cooperation of individuals who are either close observers or otherwise involved in the fraudulent activity. S. Rep. 99-345, 99th Cong., 2nd Sess. 4, reprinted in 1986 U.S.C.C.A.N. 5269. Additionally, the Reporting Committee perceived the existence of a conspiracy of silence to defraud the federal government. Id. at 6, reprinted in 1986 U.S.C.C.A.N. at 5271. 75 In these circumstances, the federal government is ill equipped to protect itself by having certain information in its possession. When, as in this case, the defrauding party is a local government entity required to submit reports to the federal government, those reports have been compiled and produced by a party whose principal motivation (assuming the truth of the fraud claim) is the elimination of the paper trail of fraud. If state and local government reports were treated as administrative reports under the Act, the jurisdictional bar might be invoked through information submitted by those bent on convincing a federal agency that no fraud, in fact, was occurring. That problem is especially evident here where the County's GPR is the only source from which the public could have learned of the County's misrepresentations to the federal government. 76 Moreover, a broad reading of administrative reports would be fundamentally inconsistent with the purpose and tenor of the 1986 amendments. Congress undertook the amending of the FCA to eliminate the draconian government knowledge standard applied since 1943. This standard barred all actions where it could be shown, no matter how attenuated the case, that the information on which the qui tam suit was based had passed into the possession of the federal government prior to the suit's filing. See S.Rep. No. 345, 99th Cong., 2d Sess. 10-13, reprinted in 1986 U.S.C.C.A.N. 5266, 5275-78 (discussing inter alia United States ex rel. Wisconsin v. Dean, 729 F.2d 1100 (7th Cir.1984), where it was held that the state of Wisconsin could not maintain an action based entirely on that state's investigations of the defendant because the state had conveyed the same information to federal agencies in routine disclosures required by federal law). Concerned about the conspiracy of silence and the prevalence of fraud, Congress sought to reforge the balance between over- and under-deterrence. See S.Rep. No. 345, 99th Cong., 2d Sess. 6, reprinted in 1986 U.S.C.C.A.N. at 5271. The principal intent of the 1986 amendments was to have the qui tam suit provision operate somewhere between the almost unrestrained permissiveness represented by the Marcus decision and ... the restrictiveness of the post-1943 cases, which precluded suit even by original sources. Stinson, 944 F.2d at 1154. 77 The expansion of the FCA's definition of administrative report to state and local government reports would in effect return us to the unduly restrictive government knowledge standard. There is no suggestion that HUD had any access to information about the misrepresented state of facts beyond what the County submitted in its 1992 GPR. Nor is there evidence of any government investigation based on this information prior to the airing of Dunleavy's allegations. Although under the Stinson standard, this information is potentially accessible by any citizen willing to proceed under the Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552 et seq., we cannot overlook the fact that Stinson dealt with information produced on the public record in connection with litigation while here we are concerned with reports that may be filed away without the receiving agency being put on notice that there is any reason to give them close attention. 14 78 For the above reasons, we conclude that Congress meant to bar reliance only on administrative reports originating with the federal government. Since the 1992 GPR was prepared by or at the behest of Delaware County, it is not a source of public disclosure contemplated by Congress. Because we have answered the first part of our inquiry in this manner, we do not need to go on to the issue of the extent of disclosure.