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§ 881

Citation
§ 881
Parent Document
United States v. Southland Management Corp., 326 F.3d 669 (2002)
Effective Date
2002-05-22
Original Source
https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/27565/united-states-v-southland-managem... ↗

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to materiality – the civil FCA contains an implicit materiality
requirement. This determination was based on the court’s
conclusion that materiality is inherent in the concept of a
“false claim.” Id. at 623-24. According to the Wilkins court, a
false claim is distinguishable from a false statement because the
former requires that the “claim itself must be false or
fraudulent.” Id. at 623. The defining characteristic of a
“false claim” is that the claimant is not actually entitled to
the money or property claimed. Thus, the Wilkins court concluded
that a false or misleading statement renders a claim “false” only
if that falsehood implicates the claimant’s entitlement or right
to the benefit in question. Id. at 624. The actual impact of
the falsehood on the government’s subsequent decisionmaking
process did not play any role in the Wilkins court’s analysis.
Indeed, the Wilkins court specifically rejected the suggestion
(made by the government in that case) that the FCA’s implicit
materiality requirement should turn on whether the government
would have approved the claim in question but for the alleged
falsehood. Id. at 636. The fact that the government would not
have ultimately approved the contract in question but for the
alleged false statements was not dispositive to the Wilkins
court.
     13
        The dissent suggests that this court is bound by the
Supreme Court’s decision in Kungys to find that the FCA’s
implicit materiality requirement must be an “outcome materiality”
requirement. While we emphasize that we need not decide the
exact nature of the FCA’s materiality requirement in the instant
case, we note that Kungys is not dispositive on this issue. In
Kungys, the Court considered the meaning of the term “material”
in the context of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which
provides for the denaturalization of citizens whose citizenship
orders and certificates of naturalization were illegally procured
or were procured by concealment of a material fact or by willful
misrepresentation. See 8 U.S.C. § 1451 (1994). To discern
Congress’s intended meaning of the word “material,” the Court
looked to the common law definition of the word, reasoning that
“‘[w]here Congress uses terms that have accumulated settled
meaning under either equity or the common law, a court must
infer, unless the statute otherwise dictates, that Congress means
to incorporate the established meaning of these terms.’” Kungys,
485 U.S. at 770 (quoting NLRB v. Amax Coal Co., 453 U.S. 322, 329