While all eyes are on the Supreme Court today for the oral
arguments in Cochise Consultancy, Inc. v. United States ex rel.
Hunt, the Court quietly made additional False Claims Act news
yesterday as it denied certiorari in Brookdale Senior
Living Communities, Inc. v. United States ex rel. Prather.
This marks the second time in as many months that the Court
has declined to provide further guidance on the metes and bounds of
Escobar's materiality standard.
In Prather, the relator alleged that the
defendant's untimely certification of the need for homebound
Medicare benefits rendered its claims for those services false. The
Sixth Circuit held that the relator adequately pleaded materiality under Escobar because the timeliness
requirement was an express condition of payment, the government did
not know of the noncompliance when it paid the claims, and the
timeliness requirement was designed to be a "mechanism of
fraud prevention" and therefore went to the "essence of
the
