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Publication Date

2007

Abstract

During its short existence, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the U.S.-led occupation regime that governed Iraq from May 2003 to June 2004, entered into security and reconstruction contracts amounting to billions of dollars. Fraud pervaded the chaotic contracting environment of CPA-era Iraq. The False Claims Act (FCA), enacted by Congress during the Civil War to protect the Union from profiteering suppliers, remains the U.S. government's most effective tool in combating fraud. Whistleblower or qui tam provisions within the FCA function to assist the under-staffed contractingcorps ferret out fraud. This Note will argue that the FCA should apply to all CPA contracts. This argument is contrary to the recent holding of a federal district court in Virginia, which ruled that claims on Iraqi funds were beyond the reach of the FCA. Failure to apply the FCA to these claims will result in a troubling accountability lacuna. In distinguishing the applicability of the FCA to the various sources of funds at issue, the court relied on tenuous constructs of international law. Furthermore,the court's exclusion of Iraqi funds relies on an overly mechanical interpretation of the type of harm the U.S. government must suffer under the FCA. Ubiquitous fraud undermined the United States 'capacity to effectively operate the transitional government and damaged the integrity of the U.S. procurement system, which was inextricably intertwined with the CPA. In addition to this non-proprietary harm, Congress's dedication of vast amounts of appropriated funds to the CPA ensures that the U.S. government also sustained monetary harm, albeit indirectly, as a result of fraud on Iraqi funds.

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