The University of Phoenix has failed in another attempt to get a federal judge to dismiss a whistle-blower lawsuit against it.

The for-profit institution, the country’s largest private university, is being sued under the federal False Claims Act by two former admissions recruiters who allege that it obtained billions of dollars in student-aid money while violating federal policies on how it compensated recruiters.

The case was initially dismissed and then reinstated by a federal appeals court. Phoenix then tried unsuccessfully to have that decision reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court, but in April, the high court declined to take the case, sending it back to a federal court in California for trial.

It was there that Phoenix, which is owned by the Apollo Group Inc., sought another dismissal, arguing that a settlement it reached with the U.S. Department of Education in 2004 should have ended the lawsuit because there were no more issues to be resolved. But the two whistle-blowers and the U.S. Department of Justice countered that the settlement did not constitute an “alternate remedy” required under the False Claims Act because it was never approved by the U.S. attorney general.

In a ruling made public on Monday, Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. of the U.S. District Court in Sacramento ruled against Phoenix and said that the lawsuit was “not moot” on account of the 2004 settlement. —Goldie Blumenstyk