DoD has announced that complaints to its inspector general hotline have increased 125 percent in the past four years.
The hotline director said the increase is a result of greater outreach. “We are marketing and branding and making ourselves more accessible, and the trend is we’re getting a lot more complaints nowadays than we were a few years ago,” said the hotline’s director, Patrick Gookin.
About 31,000 calls were logged with the hotline in fiscal 2013, resulting in 4,862 referrals. One call to the hotline resulted in a multi-million dollar contracting investigation in the Navy, others have led to a 2010 investigation into mismanagement at Arlington National Cemetery, an investigation into sexual abuse at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, as well as a 2011 probe into improper handling of remains of the nation’s war dead at Dover Air Force Base, Del.
Email is no longer used; most complaints are made online, and complaints made by phone are not recorded, DoD said, adding that the IG can only release the results of an investigation via Freedom of Information Act request.
