Last month the Whistleblowers Protection Blog did an excellent post following up on the ACLU’s attack on the federal False Claims Act. After the District Court’s dismissal of the ACLU’s lawsuit, the ACLU appealed the matter to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. The matter has been fully briefed, and it was argued on
Sept. 20, 2010.
The folks at the National Whistleblower Center have been looking into the roots of the ACLU’s interest in qui tam litigation. The following is a quote from the Jan. 27, 2011 post on WPB:
The lead attorney who authored the principal appellate brief attacking the False Claims Act was Benjamin Sahl, an attorney who now works for Cowan, Liebowitz, and Altman. The Cowan firm represents numerous corporations which oppose the FCA, including pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly, Merck, and SANOFI–Aventis as well as financial groups like Morgan Stanley and Citigroup. These corporate interests certainly feel the dent in their pockets because of the False Claims Act, the safeguard for all whistleblowers. Corporations would like to see the FCA weakened.
However, these corporate interests did not directly sponsor the litigation. Instead, the case was filed in the name of three “public interest” groups, the American Civil Liberties Union, OMB-Watch and the Government Accountability Project. The financial donors who provided the tax-exempt donations that paid for the litigation were not revealed in court filings.
The urge to insert a little light-hearted fun into this serious situation–by saying something like “It has always seemed to me that most of the folks working for the ACLU were not capable of maintaining real jobs, much less jobs like that”–is overwhelming, but the fact remains that this is a very serious issue and there would be extremely detrimental results from all of this if the Fourth Circuit were to agree with the ACLU.
I believe the real roots of the ACLU’s interest in this lie somewhere else entirely–to lawyers practicing in this field, all (or almost all) of the cases cited by the ACLU in its complaint have one thing in common….
Many thanks to Stephen Kohn and Richard Renner at the Whistleblower Protection Blog for this post!
At any rate, stay tuned.