The US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit recently reviewed a district court’s dismissal of an FCA claim against the City of Chicago, in which the relator alleged that the City’s certifications of compliance with civil rights laws were false because the City engaged in practices which increased racial segregation. The case is United States ex rel. Hanna v. City of Chicago, and can be found here.

On August 22, the Seventh Circuit affirmed dismissal of the relator’s complaint for failure to comply with Fed. R. Civ. 9(b). The most notable takeaway from this case is the court’s holding that where the complaint itself did not specify which statutes and regulations the City violated (and with which it thus falsely certified compliance), the relator could not rely on more specific statutory and regulatory references later identified in his briefs. The court observed: “If the particularity requirement is meant to ensure more thorough investigation before filing, it is not too much to ask that one aspect of that investigation include the specific provisions of law whose violation made the certification of compliance false. Moreover, if, as in this case, a defendant is presented with an undifferentiated raft of statutory and regulatory provisions, it will be nearly impossible for the defendant to prepare a defense.” In other words, Rule 9(b) requires an FCA relator to plead his or her theory of fraud with specificity, and to do so in the complaint. Where the alleged fraud is based on a regulatory or statutory violation, relators cannot punt articulating what that statute or regulation actually was.

The court found a number of other Rule 9(b) pleading deficiencies in addition to the foregoing, serving as a reminder that the rule is a powerful tool to weed out meritless FCA claims.