Court Opinion

ID: 6937158
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-07-24 00:40:51.822466+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T16:07:32.062859
License: Public Domain

MICHAEL DALY HAWKINS, Circuit Judge,
concurrence in which Circuit Judge KOZINSKI joins:
Judge Hall pens a thoughtful opinion and reaches, I believe, an entirely correct result. I would get there via a somewhat different route. This is a case in which we are fundamentally called upon to reconcile two separate Acts of Congress sharing a common purpose: the investigation and reporting of allegations of fraud on the government. The district court should be affirmed because a side by side comparison of these two measures leads inescapably to the conclusion that Congress could not have intended that an auditor in the employ of an Inspector General — whose very job it is to detect and pursue allegations of fraud — should share in the substantial financial rewards intended for those who have no such job.
The policy implications which flow from concluding otherwise are frightening. Agents of the United States who are sworn to gather facts in a fair and neutral manner would, like the small town traffic magistrates of a thankfully bygone era, have a personal financial stake in the outcome of their efforts. Persons whose job it is to discover and report fraud to their supervisors would benefit from down playing the importance of their discoveries. Congress intended that inspectors general conduct professional inquiries and report the facts as they find them. As part of the effort to detect fraud, Congress also intended to enlist support from “whistle-blowers” — persons outside the formal investigative structure. It is difficult to imagine that Congress, through the enactment of these two complementary measures, could have intended the creation of some sort of mad combination of the Sheriff of Nottingham and Inspector Clouseau.