Opinion ID: 202112
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Availability of Equitable Tolling Under the FTCA

Text: 67 There is at the outset a question whether equitable tolling can apply to FTCA claims at all. This is because equitable tolling is not a rule about the accrual of a claim; equitable tolling instead halts the running of the clock once a claim has accrued. While the rule governing delayed accrual fits comfortably with the statutory language, which makes no provision for determining when a claim accrues, tolling of the statute after accrual fits the language of the statute less comfortably. Because 28 U.S.C. § 2401(b) provides no express exceptions to the two-year time limit that begins once a claim accrues, the question is whether tolling is implicitly permissible. The twin poles of the analysis we must undertake to answer the question are the Supreme Court's decisions in Irwin v. Dep't of Veterans Affairs, 498 U.S. 89, 111 S.Ct. 453, 112 L.Ed.2d 435 (1990), and United States v. Brockamp, 519 U.S. 347, 117 S.Ct. 849, 136 L.Ed.2d 818 (1997). 68 In Irwin, the Court considered whether the statute of limitations governing claims against the government under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e et seq., contained an implied equitable tolling provision. The Court noted that: 69 We have allowed equitable tolling in situations where the claimant has actively pursued his judicial remedies by filing a defective pleading during the statutory period, or where the complainant has been induced or tricked by his adversary's misconduct into allowing the filing deadline to pass. We have generally been much less forgiving in receiving late filings where the claimant failed to exercise due diligence in preserving his legal rights. 70 498 U.S. at 96, 111 S.Ct. 453. So saying, it announced that the same rebuttable presumption of equitable tolling applicable to suits against private defendants should also apply to suits against the United States. Id. at 95-96, 111 S.Ct. 453. This was in part because, the Court said, once Congress has waived sovereign immunity, making the rule of equitable tolling applicable to suits against the Government, in the same way that it is applicable to private suits, amounts to little, if any, broadening of the congressional waiver. Id. at 95, 111 S.Ct. 453. 71 Brockamp set the outer boundary of the rule announced in Irwin. In Brockamp, the Court found that the limitations provision applicable to suits for tax refunds under 26 U.S.C. § 6511 contained no implied equitable tolling provision. The provision at issue in that case set forth a detailed mechanism for determining which claims could be brought and under what circumstances, provided explicit exceptions and varied the amount of damages recoverable with the amount of time elapsed between overpayment and the filing of a suit. The Court said of the section that its technical language, the iteration of the limitations in both procedural and substantive forms, and the explicit listing of exceptions, taken together, indicate to us that Congress did not intend courts to read other unmentioned, open-ended, `equitable' exceptions into the statute that it wrote. There are no counterindications. Brockamp, 519 U.S. at 352, 117 S.Ct. 849. 72 Unlike the statute at issue in Brockamp, the FTCA's limitation provision speaks in clear and simple terms of its time limitation. In this regard, it is far more like the provision at issue in Irwin. The other circuits generally explicitly agree or simply take it as given that equitable tolling defenses are applicable in the context of the FTCA. See, e.g., Motley v. United States, 295 F.3d 820, 824 (8th Cir.2002); Perez v. United States, 167 F.3d 913, 917 (5th Cir. 1999); Lehman v. United States, 154 F.3d 1010, 1016 (9th Cir.1998); Muth v. United States, 1 F.3d 246, 251 (4th Cir.1993). 73 We note that Dammers in fact argues two distinct tolling doctrines in support of her position. Specifically, she argues that she was delayed in filing her claim because 1) she was under duress as a result of being threatened by members of the Winter Hill Gang, and 2) the government fraudulently concealed or misrepresented information vital to her claim. Both of these arguments drink from the same cup: they both propose that considerations of justice and equity require allowing an extension of the time for filing. Because of this similarity, we can see no reason to distinguish between the theories for purposes of determining whether they may be applied to delay the deadline for filing a federal claim under the FTCA. Consequently, we conclude that fraudulent concealment and duress are both available for tolling FTCA claims.