“Never once in their complaint or in their brief do the relators ever allege — let alone allege with plausibility and particularity — that the government actually or likely would have refused to pay Academi had it known of the alleged misrepresentations,” Academi said. “The absence of such alleged facts by itself mandates that the relators’ claims be dismissed under Rule 8 and Rule 9(b) for failing to plead materiality as required by Escobar.”

According to Academi, the former marksmen had contended that even if one of their causes of action under the FCA failed under Escobar, their other claims still had standing. But Academi said Escobar dooms them all, noting that a common requirement for FCA claims is that the alleged falsehood must be “material.”

William Copley, a Weisbrod Matteis & Copley PLLC attorney representing the marksmen, told Law360 on Friday that “Academi’s motion is a late-stage Hail Mary that indefensibly misreads the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Escobar as a significant retraction of the scope of the False Claims Act, and misrepresents the allegations in the complaint.”

Copley added, “No other court has adopted Academi’s misreading of Escobar, and we do not expect the district court in this case to be the first.”

Counsel for Academi did not respond Friday to a request for comment.

The same day Academi moved for a win, Beauchamp and Shepherd slammed the company for adding 46 witnesses to its original list of nine shortly before the close of discovery, calling the untimely disclosure an attempt at “trial by ambush.”

In addition to asking the court to block Academi’s newly disclosed witnesses from testifying at trial, the relators hit back at the company for failing to authenticate thousands of its business records, which include invoices and vouchers from the State Department.

The case has had ongoing discovery disputes, including when the court in September said fellow State Department contractor Triple Canopy Inc. will have to comply with a third-party subpoena after a magistrate judge refused to let the security contractor off the hook.

Since winning expanded discovery on the FCA allegations in the summer, the former marksmen have pushed for more documents from third parties, such as Triple Canopy. Triple Canopy and Academi have both pushed back on requests for firearms training scorecards, and Triple Canopy had filed a motion to quash the document requests, claiming that they run too far afield from the actual issues in the case.

The men filed their initial complaint against what had been known as Xe Services LLC in April 2011, accusing their former employer of lying about the work duties of employees for billing purposes, charging the State Department for work performed by contractors who had been disqualified by failed drug tests and billing for unqualified shooters.

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III dismissed their case in March 2013 because their second amended complaint, filed in November 2012, came after a news report the previous July publicly revealed the accusations. The government declined to intervene in the case, and the allegations were also investigated by the State Department’s Office of Inspector General.

The whistleblowers then appealed to revive the weapons qualification allegations in their suit, which contended that they were unqualified to use the M249 and M240 belt-fed machine guns they were required to know how to use and that their weapons certifications had been falsified. Academi’s U.S. Training Center Inc. had routinely falsified the weapons certifications, the men claimed.

The Fourth Circuit revived their suit in February, finding that the former contractors’ claims preceded any public disclosure of the allegations by more than a year.

“Through constantly shifting theories, McBride has dragged this languishing case along long after discovery — including the deposition testimony of the U.S. Army’s own Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 30(b)(6) witnesses — made clear that KBR’s recreation-center headcounts were immaterial,” the brief said.

The companies urged the court to reject McBride’s appeal without oral argument, citing years of litigation and high cost of its defense. In addition, the companies pointed out that only KBR Services is the proper defendant in the case, and the litigation has put a substantial burden on the other companies involved.

“The time has come to finally close the book on this costly litigation, which, as the district court noted, has forced KBR to spend ‘a king’s ransom’ defending against baseless claims,” the brief said.

McBride’s appeal argued that the judge did not apply a two-prong test, laid out in U.S. v. Science Applications International Corp., in which a court weighs whether adherence to contractual requirements was either a precondition for payment or material to payment.

Had U.S. District Judge Frederick J. Scullin Jr. used this test, he would have found that contract clauses made clear that contract adherence was a condition for KBR’s payment, she said. In addition, a government contracting officer has said officials “may not have paid” had they known KBR violated its contractual obligations, McBride said.

KBR did not meet a contractual obligation related to keeping sufficient records of its staffing levels at a morale, welfare and recreation center for Marines in Iraq, and therefore filed false claims by not disclosing this when it billed the government for payment, according to McBride.

An attorney for KBR has said that the contractor did not inflate its staffing numbers and did not use these figures as a basis for its billing. Thursday’s brief built on that argument, saying that contracting officials based their staffing for billing on the overall population of the base, not any measure of the use of the facility.

In a statement from counsel John Elwood, KBR defended its record in Iraq, saying it was proud of the work that it had done on behalf of the military and that it hoped the DC Circuit would affirm Judge Scullin’s decision.

“The district court correctly held that the alleged inflation of headcounts at KBR-run recreation centers in Iraq was immaterial to government payment decisions and thus cannot give rise to False Claims Act liability. Relator Julie McBride’s appeal seeks to set aside that well-reasoned decision,” the statement said.

McBride, along with two former KBR employees, had filed a qui tam suit against KBR, then-parent Halliburton Co. and several units of the companies in April 2005, alleging violations of the FCA, retaliation, and breach of employment contract.

In 2001, KBR had been awarded a contract to carry out the third round of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program in support of the global war on terror. According to the suit, the defendants overbilled the government on one of the task orders under the multibillion-dollar contract, which allowed KBR to bill the government for a base fee, plus a potential performance fee and costs.

In October 2015, Judge Scullin declined to reconsider his summary judgment grant to KBR, saying he already wrestled with the case law and was unconvinced by McBride’s arguments there was sufficient evidence to support claims against the contractor.