by Ben Vernia | January 8th, 2014
On January 2, in U.S. ex rel. Lesinski v. S. Florida Water Mgmt. Dist., the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the District Court’s dismissal of a whistleblower’s case on the grounds that the entity sued was not a “person” subject to a whistleblower’s case under the False Claims Act. In doing so, the Court noted that it had not previously ruled on whether applying factors relevant to state immunity under the Eleventh Amendment’s applies in the context of the Act, and it concluded that it was the appropriate standard to use. Applying four factors (1. How state law defines the entity; 2. What degree of control the state maintains over the entity; 3. The source of the entity’s funding; and 4. Who is responsible for judgments against the entity), the Court concluded that the defendant, a regional water district, comprised an arm of the state and so was not susceptible to suit. With respect to the third and fourth factors, the Court concluded that the district’s ability to levy taxes had to be viewed in the context of state funding for the district, and did not create such autonomy to render it a “person” under the Act. Likewise, although the relator offered to look only to the district to satisfy any judgment in the case, and pointed to a self-insurance fund, the Court concluded that the relator could not detach the significance of the district’s potential legal liability for judgments from its relevance to the district’s relationship with the state for immunity purposes.
