A bipartisan group of senators is pushing the IG’s office at the Defense Department to step up its investigations of whistleblower disclosures and reprisal, asking the office what it is doing to address “significant delays in investigation, the lack of a fully implemented, reliable, and comprehensive case management system, ineffective oversight of service branch inspector general reprisal investigations, and allegations of reprisal and misconduct within the DoD OIG itself.”
Problems include “chronic noncompliance with statutory notification requirements, poor case management, significant challenges in tracking and monitoring service IG reprisal investigations, a lack of implementation of key recommendations from the Government Accountability Office, a low substantiation rate in reprisal cases” and more, they said in a statement.
The letter noted that many of those issues had been pointed out by a GAO report a year ago, but that GAO recently said that the IG’s office has not carried out several of the recommendations–even though it had said it agreed with them.
They also pressed for compliance with one GAO recommendation to which the IG did not agree, to regularly report to Congress on corrective actions taken in response to substantiated reprisal claims. While actions that are taken are reported in semi-annual IG reports, those reports do not include instances where management declined to take actions the IG recommended, making it hard to determine “the extent to which whistleblowers actually are made whole and retaliators are held accountable.”
