DOJ just won another victory in the long-running Omnicare case. Back in April, the jury found that Omnicare had submitted 3.3 million false claims and was liable for damages of over $135 million. The Judge trebled that damages number, as required by the False Claims Act, reaching a final damages amount of over $406 million, a massive win against healthcare fraud.

Its misconduct? Distributing—and billing for—drugs that weren’t supported by valid prescriptions. The jury found it did so by “rolling over” prescriptions for individuals in residential long-term care facilities, creating new prescription numbers or refills in order to continue dispensing and billing drugs.

At issue most recently? The government was seeking statutory penalties. Under the FCA, defendants not only face mandatory trebling of the damage they inflict on government programs, but have to pay statutory penalties for each false claim they submitted. Here, based on the jury’s verdict, defendants were exposed by simple math to almost $27 billion in penalties. Likely recognizing that would be unconstitutionally high, especially when compared to the damages amount, the government sought a far more proportional penalty of a mere $542 million. Defendants challenged it under the Excessive Fines provision of the Constitution, but the Court, after reviewing precedent, found that the 4X multiplier of damages that it represented was proportional to the conduct at issue. As a result, the company faces nearly $1 billion in total payments to the Government.

The Court also made important rulings to keep the other defendant, CVS, on the hook for its role in the fraud. The jury had found that CVS was jointly liable for 30.4% of Omnicare’s false claims. CVS sought to avoid the result by arguing that it was only a shell company and that the jury hadn’t found that any damage resulted solely from its conduct.

Thankfully, the Court rightly held that companies can’t escape liability under the FCA by hiding behind holding companies. A company having no employees and only a board of directors still has not only the obligation not to commit fraud against government healthcare programs, but the legal ability to have knowledge that what it was doing was wrong.

The Court also denied CVS’s challenge to penalties. The Government was seeking to assess $164 million in penalties, calculated at the same 30.4% portion of Omnicare’s false claims. CVS tried to avoid it saying the jury had not found it had caused extra damage to the Government, but the Court noted that the jury had not been instructed on joint liability and found it reasonable to base the penalty calculation on the same proportional share as they had been found to contribute to the fraud.