The ruling did not determine whether university data were accurate. It found that the former employee’s internal reports did not connect the errors to suspected fraud against the federal government.

A federal judge has dismissed the remaining claim in a whistleblower lawsuit filed by a former Texas Tech University data official who alleged that he was fired after reporting errors in university staffing information.

U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix dismissed Nicolas Valcik’s False Claims Act retaliation claim with prejudice, ending the case at the trial-court level. Hendrix concluded that Valcik had not shown that his internal reports constituted activity protected by the federal anti-fraud law.

The ruling did not find that Texas Tech’s data were accurate, nor did it decide whether Valcik or university administrators were responsible for the reported errors. Instead, the decision focused on whether Valcik’s complaints put university officials on notice that he was trying to stop suspected fraud involving federal payments.

The case, Valcik v. Texas Tech University, was filed in April 2024 in the Northern District of Texas.

Dispute began with faculty data

Texas Tech hired Valcik in September 2020 as managing director of the Office of Institutional Research. The office is responsible for collecting, reviewing and reporting information about the university, including faculty and staffing data used for institutional, state and federal reporting.

Valcik alleged that he discovered errors in faculty records in 2022. His lawsuit said the information needed to be corrected because it could affect reports submitted in connection with state appropriations, federal grants and Title IV student-aid programs.

According to Valcik, university administrators resisted correcting the information because Texas Tech’s president had already used the figures publicly. He claimed officials preferred not to acknowledge that the data required revision and that his attempts to address the problem were followed by his dismissal on April 11, 2022.

Valcik’s attorney previously said his client was attempting to preserve the integrity of university reporting. The lawsuit characterized his conduct as an effort to prevent a potentially fraudulent federal grant submission.

Texas Tech disputed that account. In its court filings, the university said Valcik was terminated because senior officials had lost confidence in the accuracy of his work and his descriptions of interactions with other employees.

The university alleged that data discrepancies had been raised before the events identified in the lawsuit. It also accused Valcik of directing an employee to alter reports to match information that the university considered erroneous.

Those competing allegations were not resolved through a trial.

University dismissed before remaining officials

Valcik initially named Texas Tech itself as the defendant. The university argued that it was protected by sovereign immunity as a state institution.

Texas Tech pointed to an earlier False Claims Act case involving the university and its Health Sciences Center. In that case, the Fifth Circuit concluded that the Eleventh Amendment barred a private whistleblower’s claims against the state institutions. The history and legal arguments in that earlier case are detailed in a Justice Department filing with the U.S. Supreme Court.

After Texas Tech was dismissed from Valcik’s case, his remaining retaliation claim proceeded against Chief Financial Officer Noel Sloan and Chief Data Officer Brandon Hennington.

Valcik alleged that the two officials violated the False Claims Act by terminating him because he had raised concerns about erroneous information.

Why the remaining claim failed

The False Claims Act’s retaliation provision protects employees, contractors and agents from being fired or otherwise discriminated against for lawful efforts to stop violations of the federal anti-fraud statute.

To advance such a retaliation claim, Valcik needed to allege that he engaged in protected activity, that the defendants knew about that protected activity and that he was fired because of it.

Hendrix concluded that Valcik’s account did not satisfy the first requirement.

According to the ruling, Valcik reported inaccurate data, but he did not tell Sloan, Hennington or other officials that he believed the information was being used to obtain money fraudulently from the federal government.

“He reported the incorrect data itself, but did not report any concern that the incorrect data was being used to defraud the government,” Hendrix wrote, as quoted in Lubbock Lights’ report on the dismissal.

The court also noted that Valcik said the erroneous information was corrected. Hendrix therefore concluded that the internal complaints, as described in the lawsuit, did not concern false or fraudulent claims for federal payment.

That distinction was critical. Reporting an internal mistake—even an important one—is not automatically protected by the False Claims Act. The employee’s activity must be sufficiently connected to investigating, reporting or attempting to stop conduct that could reasonably constitute fraud against the federal government.

The act is designed to address knowingly false requests for federal money. The Justice Department describes the law as applying when a person knowingly submits a false claim for payment or improperly avoids an obligation to repay the government.

Ruling did not validate either side’s factual account

At the dismissal stage, the court treated Valcik’s well-pleaded factual allegations as true for purposes of analyzing whether they stated a legally sufficient claim. That procedural assumption did not establish that his allegations were factually correct.

Likewise, dismissing the retaliation claim did not prove Texas Tech’s allegations that Valcik had produced inaccurate work or attempted to conceal errors.

The judge ruled only that the conduct described in Valcik’s complaint did not amount to protected whistleblowing under the False Claims Act because his internal reports were not tied closely enough to suspected federal-payment fraud.

The dismissal with prejudice prevents Valcik from bringing the same claim again in the district court. The publicly indexed docket lists the federal case as closed.