From the Washington Post:
But since returning to work under Inspector General Gail Ennis, they said they have been excluded from meaningful assignments, given tasks below their experience and abilities, shut out of meetings and collaboration with colleagues, and denied opportunities for advancement. Their claims are echoed in contemporaneous emails with management officials and backed up by two senior officials familiar with their work climate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. ...
How could OIG leadership not foresee that retaliation would draw further negative publicity? By this point, I may be more concerned that OIG leadership lacks common sense than anything else.
20 comments:
One big problem at SSA, and this goes far beyond OIG, is that there is absolutely no accountability for incompetence or malfeasance by upper management. None.
Show up to work drunk? No accountability.
Nepotism/favoritism? No accountability.
Prohibited personnel practices? No accountability.
Operations is a disaster and can't even take claims anymore? No accountability.
At the absolute worst, they get moved to a senior advisor position. And therefore, they do whatever they please with no ramifications.
This is very typical behavior at SSA. These women should be commended. Ennis should be removed. The acting commissioner gives lip service to justice and equity. Shake off your handlers and actually do something.
Allegedly, Joscelyn is being appointed to a brand-spanking-new executive position in SSA OIG--Assistant Inspector General for Workforce Performance & Development. An entirely new component established just for her??? Seems like someone is trying to CYA.
@11:47 Sadly, the same happens in the field office too. How many "Project Manager" positions have been created to avoid terminating Grade 13+ employees.
Name any work environment where if you whistle blow, everything just goes on normally? SSA isnt special in this instance, if one of your "paralegals" whistle blows you for something you did wrong, would you be inclined to treat them as if nothing happened and promote them and give them cookies?
2:18 Do you realize that a whistle blower in the government and a whistleblower in a private law firm is comparing apples to oranges?
It's literally a federal crime to retaliate against whistleblowers. You want people reporting waste, fraud, and abuse and not fearing career suicide if they do so.
Working for the federal government is different from the private sector, where we are responsible for stewardship of taxpayers money. Congress provides that oversight, and did so in the form of whistleblower protections.
Given it's the IGs office one is told to report malfeasance to, this certainly gives plain old folks pause as to whether or not there will be any "justice".
Charles, you give the IG and her ilk too much credit. If they had any brains whatsoever, they wouldn't be in this position in the first place.
It is one of the immutable laws of the universe that you can't fix stupid. And, you can't tell a stupid entitled Karen that she is being stupid because they wouldn't be a Karen if they were capable of understanding this.
No wonder they had to hurry and make up a new Assistant IG job for Joscelyn. There’s so many executives in OIG they’re tripping over themselves. OIG outright lied to OPM to get more SES slots. Now they need to put them somewhere or risk getting found out.
Joscelyn used to oversee the office responsible for all audit/investigative operations support: HR, budget, logistics, IT, and Communications. Now—despite the OIG shrinking its staff by about one-fifth—Ennis and Alpert saw fit to break up that office and elevate FOUR executives to lead these support the functions along with a bunch of GS-15s to support them; most of whom supervise just a couple people each if any at all. The execs each draw taxpayer-funded salaries roughly $200k after bonus, and the 15s draw about $180k. And none of them “do” the mission; they “support” those who do.
Ironically, this is the office that is supposed to root out waste at SSA. How can their work have any credibility?
The statutory mission is to conduct audits and investigations. Why do they need more executives in support roles rather than front-line mission-critical roles?
If anyone made the OIG report their staffing numbers, average salary, supervisor-to-staff ratios, etc, it would reveal how bloated and wasteful this shop has become. Good stewardship and funding the front lines clearly isn’t this IG’s priority.
OPM has released 2022 FEVS results to agencies. Let’s see how long they drag their feet in releasing that data to their workforce.
But we’ve been here before, the last time someone published an article. No action then and I expect no action now. No one actually cares about accountability.
If this is how an OIG operates, and Congress does nothing, then expect conditions to worsen at SSA now that everyone knows that fraud, waste, and abuse is an accepted part of the oversight process. The American Taxpayer deserves better.
10:44 this is exactly what the taxpayers deserve. If they want better, they have to make it a priority. It isnt, so this is what they get. Three weeks of protest in front of every single SSA office around the country and in Baltimore would get the attention of congress, but nobody cares enough to do anything about it.
Prepare your future appropriately with SSA not being the lynchpin.
Those fines are/were ridiculous. How on earth would they think SSA could collect on that? By withholding future benefits? Isn't SSA there for the GOOD of the people? *shakes head in disgust*.
Spent 42 years with SSA. Nothing I hear about it (except for the very little positive) surprises me. Get rid of the plum book. The problems come every time there's a political change and the political hacks come in and say "I can fix this!", which they always assume they can accomplish in the manner Captain Picard directs his spaceship: "Make it so" Then the party in charge changes and it all starts all over again. There are a lot of people with integrity in that agency, and a lot who strive to serve the public. It is not generally appreciated by the upper strata of the agency, who live and die by statistics, and who necessarily, for the most part, shed their own integrity as they move up the ladder, especially into the excepted (above GS-15) service.
One thing this article doesn’t mention is that a judge told the IG at SSA to settle with Joscelyn and return her to an equivalent position or, if they didn’t, the judge would issue a ruling in her favor against the IG. So, if they didn’t settle with Joscelyn and give her back a position, they would have also lost that case just as they lost the case Debbie Shaw brought against the IG. So, they would have had 2 cases decided against them for retaliating against internal whistleblowers instead of just the one that they are appealing. Before they agreed to take Joscelyn back, they tried to get others to find her a position instead of taking her back. When that didn’t work, they did bring her back, but then put her in a corner with no meaningful work until just before this article was printed. Why isn’t anyone removing the IG with her track record? How can an IG who has been determined by 2 judges to have acted in bad faith with 2 of her own whistleblower employees continue be in charge of protecting SSA whistleblowers as the IG is charged by law to do? No SSA whistleblower is going to go to this woman for protection after seeing how she treated Debbie and Joscelyn. But maybe that is what SSA management wants…no one willing to blow a whistle ever…
@8:23 But maybe that is what SSA management wants…no one willing to blow a whistle ever…
I think this is exactly what is happening. Ideas are spurned in the field and good people are put down because they aren't "Yes" men.
Our recent Improving Workplace Morale meetings should have started with Miranda rights... Anything you say can and will be held against you...
@7:25: At least you got a meeting on improving morale. The one for OHO was cancelled minutes after it was announced, sending a clear message about how much management cares about that issue.
Inspector Generals are bottom feeders when it comes to POTUS or Congressional interest. So I don't understand why folks would expect action on this IG. I worked for the IG office for over 30 years. Most of that time was spent rescuing SES from stupid decisions. Ennis & prior SSA IGs are completely irrelevant as is any work by their office. The IG makes recommendations which SSA ignores. Ennis, like any other IG, has no power or influence except intimidating staff. The general public doesn't even know what an IG is. Ennis is no different than the irrelevant IGs before her except she didn't hire executives smart enough to keep her out of the news & keep her staff from revolting, She's irrelevant to SSA's future.
OHO managers actually had a "morale" meeting where Joe Lytle and Jim Borland said how much the appreciated the managers and then talked endlessly about all the ideas they had for staff - promotion potential, etc... Key to the call was the need for communication between leadership and management/staff. And did I mention that they ended the call without asking for comments or questions? Oh - but they did send out a survey. The next day there was more of the same with the ALJ corp... wasted time we could have been serving the public - instead we were asked to dial on for leadership's self serving morale call... ho hum...
@ 9:23a - actually, there was a HQ "improving workplace morale" meeting, and many of us were wondering why it wasn't extended invitationally to all OHO. I guessed that perhaps there would be separate meetings, but that's far too hopeful.
For those who couldn't attend, Joe Lyddle and Jim Boreland started off by acknowledging high levels of dissatisfaction and low morale (unavoidable given that OHO came near the very end of the pack of all federal agency components on FEVS results), and then excitedly announced their "plan" to improve it. It has something like 20 points to it, but in essence, they said that they will improve OHO morale by....wait for it...communicating with us. Quite literally, the plan sounded like basic counselor couple's therapy tips regarding communication, listening, and responsiveness.
Ironically, however, Boreland seemed convinced that this "plan to communicate" would have a direct effect of improving morale? Like talking about talking with us in and of itself was sufficient? The AFGE rep then pointed out that communication is fine, if they intend to listen and act. We all know they plan to communicate to us, but given OIG, nobody wants to communicate back with them for fear of retaliation. You can extend all the "we know you're exhausted and thanks" but we can't put that in our pockets, in our mouths, or on our backs.
You want to retain your institutional knowledge and expertise, empty platitudes won't cut it. For those of us who are attorneys in HQ writing policy and making things actually happen, we'd like to see some monetary form of compensation. For instance, why is SSA the only federal agency not providing student loan repayment assistance?
At the end of the day, they're still acting as if we're in the post-recession backlog, where people are expendable and less important than throwing bodies at the problem. That's no longer the situation, and yet they keep asking more and more of us, as our pay falls wildly behind private sector, our anticipated "raise" won't remotely keep up with inflation or increases to our federal health benefit premiums, and we're expected to just suck it up and shut up.
And people wonder why workers either are fleeing SSA, or not at all interested in applying.
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