Opinion ID: 2786807
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Counts V–VI and XII–XIII

Text: We are left with Counts V, VI, XII, and XIII, which allege that Arbour engaged in fraudulent billing in connection with other unlicensed and unsupervised clinical staff and nurse practitioners. Relators allege that the specific identit[ies] of these staff members are currently unknown to [them] but [are] well known to Arbour. We have previously upheld the dismissal of claims under the FCA for failure to plead fraud with particularity where, among other things, the individuals involved with allegedly improper billing were not identified. See, e.g., Karvelas, 360 F.3d at 233. Here, however, while the staff members in question have not been identified by name in the individual counts, the factual background of the complaint sets forth a non-exhaustive list of twenty-two Arbour employees who have obtained a National Provider Identification number despite not being licensed as social workers or mental-health counselors by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Moreover, the DPH report attached to the complaint verifies that twenty-three Arbour therapists were not licensed for independent practice and also . . . were not licensed in their discipline, and had received no documented supervision prior to January 2012. These concrete allegations, corroborated by a state agency's and XIV that allege that Arbour committed fraud by failing to have at least one licensed psychologist on staff does not state a plausible claim for relief. -24- independent report and Keohan's own admission that the clinic suffered from a fundamental lack of oversight, confirm that the basic goals of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 9(b) have been met — to provide a defendant with fair notice of a plaintiff's claim, to safeguard a wrongdoing, and to protect a defendant against the institution of a strike suit. Suna v. Bailey Corp., 107 F.3d 64, 68 (1st Cir. 1997) (internal quotation marks omitted); cf. Ge, 737 F.3d at 123 (observing that particularity requirement of Rule 9(b) is designed to ward off parasitic relators who bring FCA damages claims based on information within the public domain or that the relator did not otherwise discover (internal quotation marks omitted)). Under the circumstances, then, these counts of Relators' complaint also state claims under the FCA.