Kutak Rock attorney Nick Batter authored an article titled “Beans, Bullets, and Bribery: U.S. ex rel. Vavra v. Kellogg Brown & Root, Inc. and the Anti-Kickback Act” in the August 2015 edition of the Public Contract Law Journal.

In the article, Batter discusses the Fifth Circuit’s recent decision to use respondeat superior to transplant culpability from a low-level employee onto an entire corporation. Batter says this does little to advance the important legislative goals expressed by Congress and those inherent in the statute. The danger of the Kellogg Brown & Root decision, according to Batter, is that it undermines important provisions of the Anti-Kickback Act so that prosecutors are now incentivized to focus on prime contractors rather than building stronger cases against subcontractors and their culpable employees.

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