Disclosures of purely private misconduct are not protected by whistleblower anti-retaliation law, a federal appeals court has said, upholding a decision by the MSPB that the law only protects employees who make disclosures of government wrongdoing.
The decision from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals involved an IRS examiner who was removed on charges of misconduct which he alleged were in retaliation for alleging to his supervisor that a private company had committed income tax fraud.
The court further agreed that the employee’s allegation that the government was covering up the alleged fraud was too vague and speculative to constitute a protected disclosure of government wrongdoing.
