462
Opinion of the Court
tice costs, and excessive administrative and general service costs. The Secretary so proceeded on the assumption that Congress, when it changed the system for GME cost reimbursement, surely did not want to cement misclassified and nonallowable costs into future reimbursements, thus perpetuating literally million-dollar mistakes.
The Hospital maintains it is "irrational" to assume Congress intended the Secretary to reaudit 1984 GME costs outside the three-year reopening window of 42 CFR § 405.1885(a) (1996). We disagree. Because the period for reassessing 1984 NAPRs had closed, the Secretary's re-auditing rule, by design, could affect only the base-year per-resident calculation used to compute reimbursements from 1985 onward. In effect, the Secretary altered the reopening period prescribed in the agency's regulations by lengthening the time for base-year GME cost correction. The Secretary did not enlarge the time the agency had to seek repayment of excess reimbursements in years closed under the three-year prescription; rather, the Secretary extended only the time for determining the proper amount of reimbursement due in subsequent years.
The GME Amendment necessitated comprehensive regulations, and the reaudit rule was formulated and issued as part of the full set of regulations. Viewed in the context of other, contemporaneous changes in Medicare and the Secretary's decision not to pursue recoupment of 1984 GME reimbursements, the three-year gap from the 1986 enactment of the GME Amendment to release of the Secretary's final regulations in 1989 was not exorbitant. As the D. C. Circuit said, three years is "not an unreasonable period for developing, proposing, permitting comment, and finalizing a regulatory framework for a complex statutory scheme." Tulane, 987 F. 2d, at 797.
The Hospital also contends Congress would not have endorsed reauditing as a fair measure, because fading memories, changes in personnel, and discarded records make it
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