Efforts by the Department of Veterans Affairs to track and divert whistleblower emails may have violated a policy put forward by the Office of Special Counsel, which told agencies that whistleblowers must be allowed to reveal waste, fraud and abuse in the government without fear of retaliation.
Last week, whistleblowers showed the Washington Examiner evidence that the VA was diverting their emails to Washington, D.C. And instead of solving problems outlined by the employees, some said the VA instead was using the emails to alert whistleblowers’ superiors, and in some cases to retaliate.
“The divert list is a hit list,” one employee told the Examiner.
The VA admitted emails were being diverted, but said it was to more quickly address problems outlined in those emails. But many said they didn’t believe that, in part because, they said, the VA hasn’t generally been working to fix these various problems.
Any attempt to track emails for the purpose of retaliation would seem to go against a June 20, 2012, memo from the Office of Special Counsel.
“Although lawful agency monitoring of employee communications serves legitimate purposes, federal law also protects the ability of workers to exercise their legal rights to disclose wrongdoing without fear of retaliation, which is essential to good government,” OSC wrote then.
It added that OSC officials encourage agencies to “take appropriate steps to ensure that those policies and practices do not interfere with or chill employees’ use of appropriate challenges to disclose wrongdoing,” it added.
Special Counsel Carolyn Lerner wrote in the memo that federal law “generally prohibits adverse personnel actions” against federal workers when they reasonably believe they are revealing mismanagement or other problems in an agency.
Lerner said federal law protects the identity of these workers.
She also wrote that agency monitoring aimed at targeting protected messages to the OSC and inspectors general is “highly problematic,” and may be seen as retaliation.
“The same risk is presented by an employing agency’s deliberate targeting of an employees emails or computer files for monitoring simply because the employee made a protected disclosure,” it added.
Read the OSC memo here:
