Court Opinion

ID: 9467703
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 01:54:19.622615+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:28.647348
License: Public Domain

CANBY, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I concur in all of the opinion of Judge Wright except Part III, subdivision A. With that portion of the opinion, which affirms the imposition of 76 forfeitures, I respectfully dissent. My reading of United States v. Bornstein, 423 U.S. 303, 96 S.Ct. 523, 46 L.Ed.2d 514 (1976), compels me to conclude that appellant is liable for no more than two forfeitures under Rev.Stat. §§ 5438 and 3490.
It is true, as the majority opinion points out, that in Bornstein the subcontractor that caused the prime contractor to submit 35 false claims had no knowledge or control over the number of separate claims the prime contractor chose to submit. In my view, however, this point is not the essential part of Bornstein. The central point is found in Bomstein’s rejection of the Government’s argument that the subcontractor should be held liable for 35 forfeitures:
The difficulty with this position is that it fails to distinguish between the acts committed by Model [the subcontractor] and the acts committed by United [the prime contractor]. The distinction is a critical one, because the statute imposes liability only for the commission of acts which cause false claims to be presented.
423 U.S. at 312, 96 S.Ct. at 529 (emphasis supplied). The Supreme Court’s position is made even more clear by the language immediately following:
If United had committed one act which caused Model to file a false claim, it would clearly be liable for a single forfeiture. If, as a result of the same act by United, Model had filed three false claims, United would still have committed only one act that caused the filing of false claims and thus, under the language of the statute, would again be liable for only one forfeiture. If, on the other hand, United had committed three separate such causative acts, United would be liable for three forfeitures, even if Model had filed only one false claim. The Act, in short, penalizes a person for his own acts, not for the acts of someone else.
Id. (Emphasis supplied).
In my view, the majority here deviates from the teaching of Bornstein by subjecting the appellant to forfeitures based not upon his own causative acts, but upon the *64076 submissions by the mortgagees. Indeed, the majority’s analogy to the law of conspiracy indicates that appellant is being charged with responsibility for the mortgagee’s filings. This is what the quoted language of Bornstein instructs us not to do.
It appears from the findings and conclusions of the district court that appellant submitted two documents that falsely inflated the cost of construction: the Mortgagor’s Certificate of Cost prepared by appellant on behalf of his partnership, and the Contractor’s Certificate of Cost prepared by him as general contractor. I would accordingly hold appellant liable for two forfeitures.