There is little dispute that the False Claims Act (FCA) is among the most potent weapons for fighting fraud and government waste. In just this past fiscal year alone, the Department of Justice (DOJ) utilized the FCA to recover more than $3.7 billion across a diverse array of industries such as health care, housing, and government procurement. Recoveries in individual actions reached well into the hundreds of millions of dollars, including a whopping $465 million settlement on behalf of the federal government and state Medicaid programs as a result of one health care company’s misclassification of a generic drug.

Naturally, such recoveries under the FCA involve a tremendous number of false claims. In these kinds of large-scale matters, the government and qui tam relators alike have relied upon new and improved methods to track and prosecute their cases. Principal among these strategies is statistical sampling and extrapolation: wherein a plaintiff identifies a representative sample of claims and projects inferences from an analysis of those claims on to all of the claims at bar. Defendants often object to the use of statistics in this fashion on the grounds that it is at odds with the FCA and their right to raise individualized defenses to individual claims.