Judge Rodolfo A. Ruiz, II, District Court Judge of the Southern District of Florida, on June 18 dismissed a False Claims Act (FCA) lawsuit filed against Trividia Health, Inc. – with prejudice. With this ruling, the judge ordered the matter closed.
Trividia is a Fort Lauderdale-based, Food and Drug Administration regulated, manufacturer of blood glucose testing products. Trividia employs more than 400 employees at its Fort Lauderdale facility.
Greenberg Traurig attorneys led by Shareholder Jed Dwyer secured the dismissal in the suit.
In dismissing, the court explained that “[t]he False Claims Act prohibits people from submitting claims to the federal government for amounts it does not owe. It is not a catch-all statute targeting any conceivable form of misconduct connected with the government’s spending programs—particularly when such misconduct is proscribed by separate enforcement regimes.”
The court went on to explain that the alleged violations at issue were “proscribed by other statutes subject to their own enforcement regimes. The Court will not expand the scope of the False Claims Act into the realm of regulatory enforcement.”
The ruling also stated that because the relator alleged “no conduct expressly contemplated by the False Claims Act… the Court must rein in Relator’s expansive view of the statute.”
“We are grateful for the court’s thoughtful analysis, and very pleased for our client. Trividia takes any regulatory violations seriously. However, shoehorning these regulatory violations into an FCA claim was the wrong approach,” Dwyer said. “The court agreed, and our client is happy to have this FCA case behind them.”
The Greenberg Traurig team in the matter also included Shareholders Matthew W. Miller, Kenneth A. Horky, Avi Benayoun, Nancy E. Taylor, Robert P. Charrow, and Associates Tiffany M. Andras, Austin Bodnar, Samuel Bookhardt, IV, James Diamond, and Stephanie Peral.
Original source can be found here.