False Claims Against the U.S. Defense Lawyer

A federal false claims prosecution under 18 U.S.C. § 287 begins with a document. Someone submitted an invoice, a progress payment request, a grant drawdown, a certification of eligibility, or a reimbursement voucher, and a federal agency now believes that document said something untrue. The charge does not require the government to have lost money, and it does not require the claim to have been paid. Presenting a knowingly false, fictitious, or fraudulent claim is itself the conduct the statute reaches.

That structure makes § 287 easy for the government to charge and hard for a defendant to answer casually. In the Eastern District of Virginia, where federal contracting, grant administration, and agency procurement are concentrated, these cases arrive with an investigative file already assembled out of documents the company itself produced. The contest is rarely about what the paperwork said. It is about what the person who signed it knew and intended when it went out the door.

If a federal agent, an inspector general investigator, or an Assistant United States Attorney has contacted you about billings submitted to a federal agency, the decisions in front of you begin immediately, and most of them cannot be unwound later. Law Offices Of SRIS, P.C. represents people and businesses facing federal false claims allegations. Call (888) 437-7747 to request a consultation.

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What 18 U.S.C. § 287 Prohibits

Section 287 reaches a person who makes or presents a claim to a department or agency of the United States, or to a person in the civil, military, or naval service of the United States, knowing that claim to be false, fictitious, or fraudulent. Each of those words does independent work.

A claim is a demand for money or property, and it is broader than an invoice. Progress payments, cost vouchers, drawdowns under a grant, requests for equitable adjustment, travel and relocation claims, and demands entered through an electronic payment portal have all been treated as claims. The claim must be directed at the federal government, but it need not be submitted by the defendant in person. A claim routed through a prime contractor and paid from federal funds can still be a claim presented to the United States.

False, fictitious, or fraudulent are stated in the alternative. A fictitious claim seeks payment for work that never happened. A false claim may involve real work billed at the wrong rate, under the wrong labor category, against the wrong contract line, or by an entity that misrepresented its eligibility to hold the award in the first place.

Knowledge is the element the statute makes explicit and the element juries actually decide. The government must prove the defendant knew the claim was false when it was made or presented. Whether materiality functions as a separate element under this section, and how deliberate ignorance may properly be instructed, are questions the courts continue to work through. Confirm the current state of that law with counsel rather than relying on any general description, this page included.

Why These Cases Concentrate in the Eastern District of Virginia

Federal procurement is a geographic fact as much as a legal one. Defense components, civilian agency headquarters, and the contractors that serve them are clustered in Northern Virginia. Contract administration, invoicing systems, program management, and the auditors who examine all of it sit in the same corridor. When a billing dispute becomes a criminal referral, venue often lies in the Eastern District of Virginia because that is where the claim was presented.

The district’s schedule compounds the practical problem. Criminal cases here move quickly, and the interval between indictment and trial leaves less room for the slow accumulation of defense work that document-heavy cases require. A false claims matter can involve years of billing records, timekeeping data, contract modifications, and audit correspondence. Compressing that into a short pretrial period is a resource problem, and it has to be planned for in the first week rather than discovered in the third month.

Investigative agencies here are organized by function rather than by geography. Contract fraud referrals commonly originate with a defense criminal investigative component, a military service investigative agency, an agency inspector general, or a contract audit body, and the criminal case is frequently built on a record generated by an audit or a suspension proceeding that began as an administrative matter. By the time an indictment issues, the government has usually held the documents for a long time. A defense that starts at arraignment starts late.

How a Billing Dispute Becomes a Criminal Case

Most § 287 prosecutions do not begin as criminal matters. They begin as a questioned cost, an audit finding, a complaint from a former employee, or a civil inquiry into the same invoices. The transition to a criminal referral is often invisible from the inside. A company keeps answering audit questions and producing records, and those answers become the evidentiary spine of the later indictment.

The usual sequence runs from an audit or inspector general inquiry, to a request for records that may be voluntary or by subpoena, to interviews of the employees who signed or approved the billings, to a grand jury subpoena for the underlying accounting, timekeeping, and contract files, and then to a target letter, a plea approach, or an indictment. Every stage produces material the government keeps.

Two decisions in that sequence carry more weight than the rest. The first is whether the company and the individual are separately represented. Their interests diverge early, and counsel retained by a company who interviews an employee is not that employee’s lawyer. The second is whether anyone sits for an interview without knowing how the government has characterized them. A false statement made in that interview can become its own charge, independent of the billing conduct, and it is often easier to prove than the claim itself.

A pre-indictment posture is worth something in this district. Prosecutors will sometimes hear a written submission on knowledge, on the contract interpretation the billings rested on, or on why an administrative or civil resolution fits the conduct better than a criminal one. That submission has to land before the charging decision hardens.

The Contest Is Knowledge, Not Arithmetic

Defending a § 287 case rarely turns on proving the invoices were correct. It turns on why a reasonable person in the defendant’s position submitted them believing they were correct.

Government contracts are governed by dense regulation, and much of the billing conduct that looks damning in a summary chart is the product of contested interpretation. Labor category mapping, allocation of indirect costs, allowability of particular expenses, treatment of a request for equitable adjustment, and eligibility certifications under set-aside programs are all areas where informed people disagree in good faith. Where the underlying requirement was genuinely ambiguous, a billing consistent with one reasonable reading of it is not a knowingly false claim.

The record that supports that argument is contemporaneous and usually internal: the accounting policies in force at the time, the guidance the contracting officer gave, the approvals that moved through the system, the disclosure statements filed with the government, and the messages in which the question was asked and answered. Reliance on counsel or on an accountant, where it is genuine and documented, is a recognized route to negating knowledge, but it carries conditions and consequences, waiver among them, that have to be understood before it is raised.

Penalties, Collateral Consequences, and One Number This Page Will Not State

Section 287 sets a statutory ceiling. This page does not state it. Read it in the current text of the statute, with counsel, rather than relying on a figure repeated across the internet.

What can be described is how a federal sentence is actually built, since the statutory maximum is rarely the operative constraint. The court begins from an advisory Guidelines calculation. In a false claims case that calculation is dominated by loss, and loss is contested more heavily than any other input. The government often proposes the full value of the tainted contract, or of every claim in a billing period. The defense position is usually that loss should reflect the value of the goods and services the government actually received. The distance between those two framings can move a sentence further than any other single argument in the case.

Other inputs follow: whether the conduct involved sophisticated means, the number of victims, whether the defendant abused a position of trust, the defendant’s role relative to others, obstruction, and acceptance of responsibility. Restitution and forfeiture are decided separately from the custodial term.

The consequences outside the courtroom frequently decide the client’s future. Suspension and debarment from federal contracting can follow a charge rather than a conviction, and can end a business’s ability to operate in its market. Clearance action, professional licensing, and immigration consequences run on their own timetables. These have to be worked in parallel with the criminal case, not after it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the government have to prove the claim was paid?

No. Section 287 is written around making or presenting a claim known to be false, fictitious, or fraudulent. A claim that was rejected by the agency, caught in audit, or withdrawn before payment can still support the charge. Payment history and voluntary repayment stay relevant to loss at sentencing and to the argument about intent, but they do not end the exposure.

What is the difference between this charge and a civil false claims case?

They are separate tracks with different standards of proof, different remedies, and different decision makers, and they can run at the same time over the same invoices. A civil proceeding seeks money. A criminal prosecution under § 287 seeks a conviction and a sentence. Positions taken in one can be used in the other, which is why sequencing matters. If both are open, ask counsel how testimony, document production, and any tolling agreement in the civil matter will affect the criminal exposure before responding to either.

Can a subcontractor be charged when the invoice went to the prime contractor?

It is possible. The statute reaches claims made or presented to a department or agency of the United States, and courts have considered claims that reached the government through an intermediary rather than directly. Whether a particular subcontractor invoice qualifies depends on how the payment flowed, what the prime represented to the agency, and what the subcontractor knew about that. This is an area where the law has developed unevenly, so the answer for your contract structure needs to come from counsel reviewing the actual documents.

Is a good faith billing mistake a crime?

Not under this statute. The government must prove the defendant knew the claim was false when it was submitted. Errors, disputed interpretations of an allowability rule, reliance on a system that mapped labor categories incorrectly, and disagreements with an auditor are not knowledge. The difficulty is evidentiary rather than legal: proving good faith usually depends on contemporaneous records rather than testimony offered years later, which is why preserving and organizing those records early matters so much.

I already answered the auditors. Have I damaged the case?

Not necessarily, but counsel needs to know exactly what was said and produced before doing anything else. Statements made in an audit, in an administrative proceeding, or to an investigator become part of the government’s file and constrain what can credibly be argued later. The first task in most of these matters is reconstructing that history. It is far better to build a defense around what was already said than to be surprised by it in a courtroom.

Should the company’s lawyer represent me as well?

That depends on whether the interests are genuinely aligned, and in billing cases they often are not. A company may resolve a matter by attributing conduct to individuals. An individual may have a defense that the company approved and directed the billing. Separate representation costs more and is usually worth it. If a joint defense arrangement is proposed, its terms deserve scrutiny before anyone shares anything under it.

How quickly do these cases move once charges are filed?

The Eastern District of Virginia moves criminal cases faster than most federal districts, which in a document-heavy false claims matter is a resource question as much as a legal one. Discovery in these cases can run to accounting systems, timekeeping exports, and years of contract correspondence. Counsel needs to be building the document record and identifying the experts the case will require from the first week, because the schedule will not wait for a defense to organize itself.

Can a false claims matter be resolved before an indictment?

Sometimes. Prosecutors do consider written submissions on knowledge, on the regulatory interpretation the billings rested on, and on whether an administrative or civil resolution matches the conduct. Declination, deferred resolution, and civil-only outcomes all exist, and each depends on facts specific to the matter. What is certain is that the window closes as the charging decision firms up, so this is work that has value only if it starts early.

Mr. Sris and the Firm’s Of Counsel Attorneys

Federal procurement and public integrity cases reward preparation more than argument, because the record that decides them is fixed long before anyone walks into a courtroom.

Mr. Sris, Owner and Founder of Law Offices Of SRIS, P.C., is a former prosecutor and founded the firm in 1997. He is admitted in Virginia, Maryland, the District of Columbia, New Jersey, and New York. His background at George Mason University in accounting and information systems is applied to complex financial and technology-related cases, which is the category most federal procurement and public-integrity matters fall into. Mr. Sris and the firm’s Of Counsel attorneys, who contract directly with the firm, work on federal criminal matters together.

The firm takes federal false claims matters at any stage, though the range of available responses is widest before charges are filed. No lawyer can promise an outcome in a federal criminal case, and an honest description of a § 287 prosecution does not suggest otherwise.

The firm’s Northern Virginia location is at 1655 Fort Myer Dr, Suite 700, Room 719, Arlington, VA 22209. By appointment. Call (888) 437-7747 to schedule a consultation.

Disclaimers

This page describes false claims against the United States under 18 U.S.C. § 287 in general terms for people trying to understand a federal process. It is not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship with Law Offices Of SRIS, P.C. Federal statutes and the decisions interpreting them change over time, so confirm anything stated here against the current statutory text with counsel before acting on it.

Every federal matter turns on facts that belong to that matter alone. Case results depend on a variety of factors unique to each case. Results may vary.

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A false claims against the US case is one part of fraud & financial crimes work, and our page on bank fraud defence covers the wider process.