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: Virginia Qui Tam Law

Law Professor Pamela H. Bucy's Pioneering Efforts to Collect and Analyze State False Claims Information

By Zachary A. Kitts

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As I said when I started this blog, state qui tam statutes represent a new frontier. If state qui tam statutes are ever going to bear the same kind of fruit as the federal false claims act, at some point it will be necessary to collect and analyze the experiences of the various states to pass FCA-style statutes, as well as create a mechanism for the exchange of ideas and information among states with FCA statutes.

And that is where the ground-breaking scholarship of Professor Pamela Bucy comes in. Professor Bucy is the Bainbridge Professor of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law, and for the last several years she has been engaged in the study of state false claims acts.

She is the first, so far as I know, to collect data from each state to pass an FCA statute. In Britain they call the kind of effort necessary to collect data on that scale "hard slog."

The results of her first survey were published in 2005, in States, Statutes and Fraud: An Empirical Study of Emerging State False Claims Acts, 80 Tulane L. Rev. 465 (2005).   She followed up with articles in the Cardozo Law Review ((28 Cardozo L. Rev. 1599 (2007) and others.

Her efforts are important for more reasons that I can list here. For starters, a review of the experiences of the various state FCA statutes serves an important interest of federalism as anticipated by the founding fathers of the United States. Specifically, the founding fathers anticipated that as the several states tinkered with legislation and government models, they would serve as "laboratories of democracy."  In other words, when one state passed a new piece of legislation, or amended its constitution, or took any other step, all of the other states, along with the federal government, could observe the results and, if they were favorable, amend their own statutes or alter their own form of government.

On a more practical level, fraud schemes that are uncovered in one state will very often apply to at least one other state, and very often will apply to an entire region of the country.

These are just two examples that occur to me at the moment. As the states become more experienced with their FCAs, there is every reason to think that eventually something similar to the National Association of Medicaid Fraud Control Units ("NAMFCU") will be formed.

When that day does eventually arrive, we will all owe a debt of gratitude to Prof. Bucy.

Zach Kitts
Cook & Kitts, PLLC

Full post as published by Virginia Qui Tam Law on August 30, 2008 (boomark / email).