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By: FEDweek StaffThe Labor Department inspector general has found “problems with the completeness and timeliness of investigations into whistleblower complaints” filed with an OSHA regional office by private sector employees alleging workplace safety violations by their employers, although concluding that those problems don’t rise to the level that would provide whistleblower protection to the federal employee who disclosed them.
The investigation was done on referral from the Office of Special Counsel, which had found there was a substantial likelihood of support for an OSHA investigator’s disclosure that the region “had breakdowns processing the complaints it received, which in turn resulted in widespread failure to protect complainants.”
The Labor IG in turn found that 72 of the 75 investigations it sampled “did not meet all essential elements and 66 exceeded statutory timeframes for investigations—which can be 30, 60 or 90 days, depending on the type of disclosure—by an average of 634 days. These results were worse than the results we reported in 2010 and 2015 audits,” it said, and the region’s backlog is 57 percent higher than the agency’s national average.
The difference “could be attributed partly” to the fact that the region’s average caseload counts are about double the agency’s national average, it said.
It added: “We found no evidence of misconduct, nor evidence of any other issue that would rise to the level of violations of law, rule, or regulation and gross mismanagement,” the standard for protecting a federal employee from retaliation under the Whistleblower Protection Act.
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