The Labor Department has not done enough to protect whistleblowers inside its Occupational Safety and Health Administration from retaliation by their superiors, a new report by the department’s Office of the Inspector General found.
The report said the safety administration was lax in training agency employees on the rules regarding whistleblowers and was slow to investigate cases and report the findings to the appropriate authorities.
“OSHA did not adequately … communicate the violations alleged by whistleblowers internally to OSHA’s enforcement units or externally to other federal agencies with jurisdiction to investigate the allegations,” the inspector general said in a report completed Wednesday and released Friday.
Various federal rules, most notably the 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act, are meant to protect people inside agencies from retaliation if they go outside the regular chain of command to report violations of established procedures or abusives of authority. OSHA officials are subject to 22 such rules.
The inspector general report found that there had been 9,151 complaints from whistleblowers within OSHA between Oct. 1, 2012, and March 3, 2014, of which 4,475 were classified as investigations. These investigations took an average of 238 days to complete, an increase of 88 days from 2010, the report found. And even when investigations were completed, the correct people were often not alerted.
“This failure of notification occurred because OSHA did not establish a formal process and did not develop working relationships with agencies tasked with enforcement duties,” the report said.
The review also found that the manual for addressing whistleblowers had not been updated to include the five most recent statutes. The report concluded by pushing the administration to update to its manual and training procedures as well as to develop a formal process for alerting other agencies.
Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health David Michaels took exception to the report, saying in his official response that the report’s findings were “inaccurate or unsupported.”
“In some cases there appears to be confusion in how the OIG has interpreted OSHA’s policies, procedures and practices resulting in cases being misidentified as deficient,” Michaels said in his official response.
