Opinion ID: 723732
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Administrative vs. Criminal Sanctions

Text: 19 In addition to authorizing the Secretary to suspend the license of a dealer who make[s], for a fraudulent purpose, any false or misleading statement in connection with any transaction, 7 U.S.C. §§ 499h(a)(1) and 499b(4), the PACA authorizes the Secretary to suspend the license of a dealer convicted of a misdemeanor under 7 U.S.C. § 499n(b) (Whoever shall falsely make, issue, alter, forge, or counterfeit ... any certificate of inspection ... shall be guilty of a misdemeanor). 7 U.S.C. § 499h(a)(2). The Produce Place has not been convicted under § 499n(b), and the Secretary accordingly proceeded against the company under §§ 499h(a)(1) and 499b(4). 20 The Produce Place argues that because § 499n(b) sanctions the specific offense of forg[ing] ... a certificate of inspection, by the principle that expressio unius est exclusio alterius, forgery cannot be thought also to come within the more general condemnation of false [ ] statements in § 499b(4). The Produce Place argues also that because § 499b(6) makes it unlawful to alter ... any ... notice placed upon any container the same principle precludes reading false [ ] statement in § 499b(4) to encompass the purposeful transmission of a fraudulently altered inspection certificate. The first line of reasoning leads to the peculiar conclusion that the Secretary, who has general authority to suspend a licensee for making a false statement must, in the case of a particularly egregious type of false statement, to wit, a forged inspection certificate, await a criminal conviction before he can suspend the miscreant. The second line of reasoning leads to the equally peculiar conclusion that prior to its enactment of the criminal sanction in § 499n(b), the Congress had provided the Secretary with no authority [319 U.S.App.D.C. 373] to suspend a licensee who had fraudulently altered an inspection certificate and used it to facilitate a transaction. 21 In any event, the PACA authorized the Secretary to sanction a dealer for making a false statement long before the Congress added a criminal penalty for forging an inspection certificate. That the Congress found the threat of imprisonment necessary in order to deter that particular type of false statement in no way suggests that the Congress had not already empowered the Secretary to take administrative action against a forger under § 499b(4). Nor does anything in the legislative history provided by the Produce Place suggest that by adding a criminal provision the Congress intended to limit the Secretary's pre-existing administrative authority. Section 499h(a)(2), which authorizes the Secretary to suspend or revoke the license of any dealer convicted under the criminal provision (§ 499n(b)), is therefore better understood as a means merely of relieving the Secretary, when the inculpative facts have already been found beyond a reasonable doubt in another forum, of the procedural burden entailed in making a factual determination under § 499b(4), and not as creating the exclusive means of suspending the license of a forger. 22 Moreover, as the Secretary points out, the terms remove, alter, or tamper with in § 499b(6) do not reach the full extent of Kaplan's conduct in this case; he not only altered the inspection certificates, he submitted them to Jurach. While one might conclude from the specific terms of § 499b(6) that the Secretary cannot proceed under § 499b(4) against a licensee who has merely altered an inspection certificate without somehow using it in connection with any transaction--indeed, it is not clear that altering a certificate and then putting it in a file counts as a mak[ing a] statement--we have no occasion to reach that issue today. For now it is enough to conclude that neither of the Petitioner's expressio unius arguments is at all persuasive.