We do not doubt that Congress passed the 1986 amendments to the FCA “to strengthen the Government’s hand in fighting false claims,” Cook County, 538 U. S., at 133–134, and “to encourage more private enforcement suits,” S. Rep., at 23–24. It is equally beyond cavil, however, that Congress passed the public disclosure bar to bar a subset of those suits that it deemed unmeritorious or downright harmful. The question before us concerns the precise scope of that subset; and on this matter, the record is all but opaque. While “the absence of specific legislative history in no way modifies the conventional judicial duty to give faithful meaning to the language Congress adopted in the light of the evident legislative purpose in enacting the law in question,” United States v. Bornstein, 423 U. S. 303, 310 (1976), there is no “evident legislative purpose” to guide our resolution of the discrete issue that confronts us:chanrobles.com-red

V

Respondent and her amici likewise fail to prove their case that petitioners’ reading of the statute will lead to results that Congress could not have intended. Their argument rests on an empirical proposition: “While federal inquiries and their outcomes are readily available to Department of Justice [(DOJ)] attorneys, many state and local reports and investigations never come to the attention of federal authorities.” Brief for United States 22; see also 528 F. 3d, at 306 (“Because the federal government is unlikely to learn about state and local investigations, a large number of fraudulent claims against the government would go unremedied without the financial incentives offered by the qui tam provisions of the FCA”). This proposition is not implausible, but it is sheer conjecture. Numerous federal investigations may be occurring at any given time, and DOJ attorneys may not reliably learn about their findings. DOJ attorneys may learn about quite a few state and local inquiries, especially when the inquiries are conducted pursuant to a joint federal-state program financed in part by federal dollars, such as the program at issue in this case.[Footnote 18] Just how accessible to the Attorney General a typical state or local source will be, as compared to a federal source, is an open question. And it is not even the right question. The statutory touchstone, once again, is whether the allegations of fraud have been “public[ly] disclos[ed],” §3730(e)(4)(A), not whether they have landed on the desk of a DOJ lawyer:chanrobles.com-red

Respondent’s argument also gives insufficient weight to Congress’ decision to bar qui tam actions based on disclosures “from the news media.” Ibid. Because there was no such bar prior to 1986, the addition of the news media as a jurisdiction-stripping category forecloses the suggestion that the 1986 amendments implemented a single-minded intent to increase the availability of qui tam litigation. And since the “news media” include a large number of local newspapers and radio stations, this category likely describes a multitude of sources that would seldom come to the attention of the Attorney General:chanrobles.com-red

As for respondent and her amici’s concern that local governments will insulate themselves from qui tam liability “through careful, low key ‘disclosures’ ” of potential fraud, Brief for American Center for Law and Justice as Amicus Curiae 17, this argument rests not just on speculation but indeed on rather strained speculation. Any such disclosure would not immunize the local government from FCA liability in an action brought by the United States, see Rockwell Int’l Corp. v. United States, 549 U. S. 457 , 478 (2007)—and to the contrary it could tip off the Attorney General that such an action might be fruitful. It seems to us that petitioners have the more clear-eyed view when they assert that, “[g]iven the fact that the submission of a false claim to the United States subjects a defendant to criminal liability, fines, debarment, treble damages and attorneys’ fees, no rational entity would prepare a report that self-discloses fraud with the sole purpose of cutting off qui tam actions.” Reply Brief for Petitioners 19; see also United States ex rel. Bly-Magee v. Premo, 470 F. 3d 914, 919 (CA9 2006) (“The fear [of self-insulating disclosures] is unfounded in general because it is unlikely that an agency trying to cover up its fraud would reveal the requisite ‘allegations or transactions’ underlying the fraud in a public document”).[Footnote 19]

Our conclusion is buttressed by the fact that Congress carefully preserved the rights of the most deserving qui tam plaintiffs: those whistle-blowers who qualify as original sources. Notwithstanding public disclosure of the allegations made by a qui tam plaintiff, her case may go forward if she is “an original source of the information.” §3730(e)(4)(A). It is therefore flat wrong to suggest that a finding for petitioners will “ ‘in effect return us to the unduly restrictive “government knowledge” standard’ ” that prevailed prior to 1986. Brief for United States 31 (quoting Dunleavy, 123 F. 3d, at 746); see Brief for Respondent 34 (asserting that “petitioners’ construction would reimpose a form of the ‘government knowledge’ bar” (capitalization omitted)). Today’s ruling merely confirms that disclosures made in one type of context—a state or local report, audit, or investigation—may trigger the public disclosure bar. It has no bearing on disclosures made in other contexts, and it leaves intact the ability of original sources to prosecute qui tam actions irrespective of the state of Government knowledge. Whether respondent can qualify as an “original source,” as that term is defined in §3730(e)(4), is one of many issues that remain open on remand:chanrobles.com-red

VI

Respondent and the Solicitor General have given numerous reasons why they believe their reading of the FCA moves it closer to the golden mean between an inadequate and an excessive scope for private enforcement. Congress may well have endorsed those views in its recent amendment to the public disclosure bar. See n. 1, supra. With respect to the version of §3730(e)(4)(A) that is before us, however, we conclude that the term “administrative” in Category 2 is not limited to federal sources:chanrobles.com-red

The judgment of the Court of Appeals is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion:chanrobles.com-red

It is so ordered.

Footnote 1

On March 23, 2010, the President signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Pub. L. 111–148, 124 Stat. 119. Section 10104(j)(2) of this legislation replaces the prior version of 31 U. S. C. §3730(e)(4) with new language. The legislation makes no mention of retroactivity, which would be necessary for its application to pending cases given that it eliminates petitioners’ claimed defense to a qui tam suit. See Hughes Aircraft Co. v. United States ex rel. Schumer, 520 U. S. 939 , 948 (1997). Throughout this opinion, we use the present tense in discussing the statute as it existed at the time this case was argued.

Footnote 2

Compare 528 F. 3d, at 301–307 (limiting this portion of the public disclosure bar to federal sources), and United States ex rel. Dunleavy v. County of Delaware, 123 F. 3d 734, 745–746 (CA3 1997) (same), with United States ex rel. Bly-Magee v. Premo, 470 F. 3d 914, 918–919 (CA9 2006) (concluding that state and local sources may qualify), cert. denied, 552 U. S. 1165 (2008), and Battle v. Board of Regents for State of Ga., 468 F. 3d 755, 762 (CA11 2006) (per curiam) (assuming without analysis that state audits may qualify). The Eighth Circuit appears to have taken a “middle road” on this issue, 528 F. 3d, at 301, holding that disclosures made in nonfederal forums may count as “ ‘administrative … report[s]’ ” or “ ‘audit[s]’ ” under §3730(e)(4)(A) in some instances, as when they relate to “a cooperative federal-state program through which the federal government provides financial assistance.” Hays v. Hoffman, 325 F. 3d 982, 989, cert. denied, 540 U. S. 877 (2003).

Footnote 3

See, e.g., Rockwell Int’l Corp. v. United States, 549 U. S. 457 (2007) (construing §3730(e)(4)(A)’s original source exception); Cook County v. United States ex rel. Chandler, 538 U. S. 119 (2003) (holding that local governments are subject to qui tam liability); Vermont Agency of Natural Resources v. United States ex rel. Stevens, 529 U. S. 765 (2000) (holding that States are not subject to private FCA actions).

Footnote 4

A separate statutory provision defines an “original source” as “an individual who has direct and independent knowledge of the information on which the allegations are based and has voluntarily provided the information to the Government before filing an action under this section which is based on the information.” 31 U. S. C. §3730(e)(4)(B).

Footnote 5

See U. S. Const., Art. I, §1; id., §4, cl. 1 (distinguishing “State … Legislature[s]” from “the Congress”).

Footnote 6

The statute refers to the GAO, mistakenly, as the “Government Accounting Office.” It is undisputed that the intended referent was the General Accounting Office, now renamed the Government Accountability Office. See 31 U. S. C. §3730, p. 254, n. 2 (compiler’s note); 528 F. 3d 292, 300, n. 4 (CA4 2008); United States ex rel. Mistick PBT v. Housing Authority of Pittsburgh, 186 F. 3d 376, 387 (CA3 1999) (Alito, J.), cert. denied, 529 U. S. 1018 (2000); see also Mistick, 186 F. 3d, at 398 (Becker, C.J., dissenting) (noting that courts have “frequently” made the same scrivener’s error). We have described the GAO as “an independent agency within the Legislative Branch that exists in large part to serve the needs of Congress.” Bowsher v. Merck & Co., 460 U. S. 824, 844 (1983).

Footnote 7

In Jarecki v. G. D. Searle & Co., 367 U. S. 303 (1961), the Court applied the noscitur a sociis maxim in construing a statutory provision that referred to “ ‘[i]ncome resulting from exploration, discovery, or prospecting,’ ” id., at 305 (quoting §456(a)(2)(B) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1939). Justice Sotomayor contends that “the three terms in Category 2 are no more ‘distinct’ or ‘disparate’ than the phrase at issue in Jarecki.” Post, at 4 (dissenting opinion) (citation omitted). We disagree. Whether taken in isolation or in context, the phrase “congressional, administrative, or GAO” is not as cohesive as the phrase “exploration, discovery, or prospecting.” That is one reason why noscitur a sociis proved illuminating in Jarecki, and why it is less helpful in this case. On their “face,” the terms “exploration,” “discovery,” and “prospecting” all describe processes of searching, seeking, speculating; the centrality of such activities to “the oil and gas and mining industries” gave a clue that it was those industries Congress had in mind when it drafted the provision. 367 U. S., at 307 (internal quotation marks omitted). The terms “congressional,” “administrative,” and “GAO” do not share any comparable core of meaning—or indeed any “common feature” at all, post, at 4—apart from a governmental connotation. It takes the Sandwich Theory to graft a federal limitation onto “administrative.”

Footnote 8

A number of lower courts have concluded that, as used in Category 1, “ ‘hearing’ is roughly synonymous with ‘proceeding.’ ” United States ex rel. Springfield Terminal R. Co. v. Quinn, 14 F. 3d 645, 652 (CADC 1994); see also 1 J. Boese, Civil False Claims and Qui Tam Actions §4.02[B], p. 4–59, and n. 231 (3d ed. 2006) (hereinafter Boese); C. Sylvia, The False Claims Act: Fraud Against the Government §11:35, p. 642 (2004) (hereinafter Sylvia).

Footnote 9

See Bly-Magee, 470 F. 3d, at 918 (“Indeed, the statute would seem to be inconsistent if it included state and local administrative hearings as sources of public disclosures [in Category 1] and then, in the next breath, excluded state administrative reports as sources”); In re Natural Gas Royalties Qui Tam Litigation, 467 F. Supp. 2d 1117, 1143–1144 (Wyo. 2006) (“There is no reason to conclude that Congress intended to limit administrative reports, audits, and investigations to federal actions, while simultaneously allowing all state and local civil litigation, state and local administrative hearings, and state and local news media to be treated as public disclosures. To interpret the statute so narrowly would have the anomalous result of allowing public disclosure status to the most obscure local news report and the most obscure state and local civil lawsuit or administrative hearing, but denying public disclosure status to a formal public report of a state government agency”).

Footnote 10

Following the Court of Appeals, see 528 F. 3d, at 303, respondent asserts that only the Ninth Circuit, in A-1 Ambulance Serv., Inc. v. California, 202 F. 3d 1238, 1244 (2000), has explicitly considered and rejected the argument that Category 1 is limited to federal sources. Brief for Respondent 23–24. At least one other Circuit, however, has done the same, see United States ex rel. Hafter v. Spectrum Emergency Care, Inc., 190 F. 3d 1156, 1161, n. 6 (CA10 1999), and no lower court, as far as we are aware, has so much as suggested that an alternative construction might be viable. Moreover, the Third, Fifth, and Eleventh Circuit cases cited by the Court of Appeals postdate A-1 Ambulance and Dunleavy, 123 F. 3d 734, both of which put litigants and courts on notice of the possibility that §3730(e)(4)(A) might be limited to federal sources.

Footnote 11

On its face, §3733(l)(7)(A) is silent as to whether it includes nonfederal proceedings. Respondent and the Solicitor General suggest that it does, though they fairly argue that this provision, relating to civil investigative demands, has little if any relevance to the case at hand. See Brief for Respondent 21, n. 8; Brief for United States 31–32.

Footnote 12

The Court of Appeals repeatedly referred to the three categories in §3730(e)(4)(A) as “clauses.” See 528 F. 3d, at 300–305. Were they in fact clauses rather than prepositional phrases, reliance on noscitur a sociis might have been supported by one of our earliest cases using that term, Watson v. Mercer, 8 Pet. 88, 105 (1834) (Reporter’s statement of the case), which suggested that “different clauses of the same sentence” should be presumed “to embrace the subject matter of the sentence.” The Court of Appeals’ mistaken reference to “clauses” is of course less significant than its failure to treat the public disclosure bar as an integrated whole. Cf. Stevens, The Shakespeare Canon of Statutory Construction, 140 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1373, 1376 (1992) (emphasizing importance of reading provisions in their broader statutory context).

Footnote 13

See also H. R. Rep. No. 99–660, pp. 2–3 (1986) (text of proposed §3730(b)(5)). The public disclosure bar that was enacted more closely resembles the version in the Senate bill.

Footnote 14

State governments are already shielded from qui tam liability under our precedent. Stevens, 529 U. S. 765 .

Footnote 15

See, e.g., Dunleavy, 123 F. 3d, at 745 (“Congress gave us little specific guidance to determine the scope of public disclosure sources”); United States ex rel. Stinson, Lyons, Gerlin & Bustamante, P. A. v. Prudential Ins. Co., 944 F. 2d 1149, 1154 (CA3 1991) (“The bill that eventuated in the 1986 amendments underwent substantial revisions during its legislative path. This provides ample opportunity to search the legislative history and find some support somewhere for almost any construction of the many ambiguous terms in the final version”); id., at 1163 (Scirica, J., dissenting) (“One difficulty in interpreting the 1986 amendments is that Congress was never completely clear about what kind of ‘parasitic’ suits it was attempting to avoid”); Boese §4.02[A], at 4–46 (“The present Section 3730(e)(4) was enacted … without explanation by Congress”); id., §4.02[A], at 4–47 to 4–48 (“[A]pplicable legislative history explaining versions [of §3730(e)(4)] not adopted is of little help in deciphering this provision. Because Section 3730(e)(4) was drafted subsequent to the completion of the House and Senate Committee reports on the proposed False Claims Act Amendments, those reports, which contained discussion of altogether different bars, cannot be used in interpreting it. And the sponsors’ interpretations of the provision ultimately enacted … are spare, often incorrect, and wide-ranging enough to provide some support for almost any construction of its many ambiguities”).

Footnote 16

Justice Sotomayor makes a valiant effort to unearth from the legislative history “the balance Congress evidently sought to achieve through the 1986 amendments.” Post, at 10. But her reconstruction of the history assigns little weight to the side of this balance preserved by the public disclosure bar: the desire to minimize “the potential for parasitic lawsuits by those who learn of the fraud through public channels and seek remuneration although they contributed nothing to the exposure of the fraud,” United States ex rel. Doe v. John Doe Corp., 960 F. 2d 318, 319 (CA2 1992). And her narrative contains no account of why Category 2 emerged in the form that it did. Any such account would necessarily be an exercise in speculation, as the record is silent on the matter. In our view, neither the general trajectory of 20th-century FCA reform nor the specific statements made during the 1986 legislative process clearly point one way or the other on the question before us.

Footnote 17

See Consumer Product Safety Comm’n v. GTE Sylvania, Inc., 447 U. S. 102, 118 (1980); Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U. S. 557, 580, n. 10 (2006); see also Hafter, 190 F. 3d, at 1161, n. 6 (refusing to credit the Berman-Grassley letter in interpreting the public disclosure bar). Respondent and her amici additionally contend that the enactment of the Program Fraud Civil Remedies Act of 1986 (PFCRA), 100 Stat. 1934 (codified at 31 U. S. C. §3801 et seq.), shortly before the enactment of the FCA amendments supports their reading of the latter. See Brief for Respondent 30–33; Brief for United States 14–15; Brief for Taxpayers Against Fraud Education Fund as Amicus Curiae 28–29. Yet while “there is no question that the PFCRA was designed to operate in tandem with the FCA,” Stevens, 529 U. S., at 786, n. 17, or that the PFCRA is addressed to federal administrative agencies, there is also no explicit evidence to suggest that Congress intended to limit Category 2’s reference to “administrative” sources to the same set of agencies. The FCA’s public disclosure bar serves a distinct function not replicated in the PFCRA; the text of the public disclosure bar contains no reference to the PFCRA; and no Member of Congress, so far as we are aware, articulated any such intent.

Footnote 18

In some instances, federal law dictates that state and local governments receiving federal funds perform an audit of their programs. See 31 U. S. C. §7502(a)(1)(B) (requiring nonfederal entities that expend federal awards above a certain amount to “undergo a single audit” in accordance with specified conditions); Brief for State of Pennsylvania et al. as Amici Curiae 7–10 (discussing the Single Audit Act of 1984). It bears mention that, to the extent one is worried about Federal Government ignorance of state and local antifraud efforts, see post, at 10–11, today’s ruling may induce federal authorities to pay closer attention to such efforts going forward.

Footnote 19

Petitioners and their amici also counter with public policy arguments of their own. Under the Court of Appeals’ reading of the statute, they allege, there is an increased likelihood that parasitic relators will beat more deserving relators to the courthouse, Brief for Petitioners 31, and that state and local governments will find their antifraud investigations impeded, or will decline to conduct such investigations in the first place, on account of “opportunistic potential relators trolling state records and reports, available to the public,” in search of a qui tam claim, Brief for State of Pennsylvania et al. as Amici Curiae 11.