On January 6, the U.S. federal government filed a brief in U.S. ex rel. Zafirov v. Florida Medical Associates urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit to reverse a district judge’s ruling in a qui tam whistleblower case. In September, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida ruled that the False Claims Act’s qui tam provisions are unconstitutional, threatening to undermine the United States’ number one anti-fraud law.

The district court ruling found that the qui tam provisions were unconstitutional because they violated the Appointments Clause of Article II. The court ruled that by filing a qui tam lawsuit alleging Medicare fraud, whistleblower Clarissa Zafirov was granted “core executive power” without any “proper appointment under the Constitution.”

In its brief, the government claims that “other than the district court here, every court to have addressed the constitutionality of the False Claims Act’s qui tam provisions has upheld them.” It therefore urges the Eleventh Circuit to “join that consensus and reverse the district court’s outlier ruling.”

The government points to the Supreme Court decision in the 2000 case Vermont Agency of Natural Resources v. United States ex rel. Stevens, which held that the False Claims Act’s qui tam provisions are consistent with Article III. This decision “makes clear that relators do not exercise Executive power when they sue under the Act,” the brief states. “Rather, they are pursuing a private interest in the money they will obtain if their suit prevails. As private litigants pursuing private interests, relators are not enforcing federal law in a manner inconsistent with the Vesting and Take Care Clauses and need not be appointed in the manner required by the Appointments Clause.”

The brief further clarifies that while a relator’s qui tam suit “may also vindicate a federal interest in remedying and deterring fraud on the United States” “they are distinct from the government’s enforcement efforts even though they can supplement those efforts.”

The government additionally argues that qui tam relators are not government officers; do not exercise significant government authority due in part to the numerous statutory constraints which allow the government to “ensure that qui tam actions are consistent with its own priorities for the enforcement of federal law;” and do not occupy a continuing position since their role “is limited in time and scope, confined to a particular case, and fundamentally personal in nature.’

Further referencing Stevens and the Supreme Court’s emphasis on the long history of qui tam statutes in that decision, the government details “the prevalence of early qui tam statutes and the body of evidence that such statutes were understood to be constitutional.”

“The historical record.. suggests that all three branches of the early American government accepted qui tam statutes as an established feature of the legal system,” the brief states.

Overall, the government provides a detailed and comprehensive overview of the constitutionality of the False Claims Act’s qui tam provisions, rooted in both prior court precedent and the historical record.