The anonymous hotline tip was a head-scratcher: During an office hallway conversation, the deputy director of the National Park Service appeared to use “vulgar language” and make an “obscene gesture,” as if urinating against the wall.
The Interior Department Inspector General’s office swung into action. But the outcome was anti-climactic: A witness took no offense and the park official, P. Daniel Smith, and the other employee involved acknowledged that the vaguely off-color episode was inappropriate for a workplace. It appears no disciplinary action was taken.
Little harm, no foul. Welcome to the humdrum, day-to-day operations of the federal government’s inspectors general, independent offices within executive branch agencies that answer to Congress by law.
While national headlines focus on blockbuster IG reports like the Justice Department’s just-released one on former FBI Director James Comey’s transgressions, or its highly anticipated inquiries into the Trump-Russia affair and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s death in prison, the work of the federal watchdogs often tends toward routine business full of petty gripes and fury -- signifying nothing or not much.
Sure, the news media perk up when a White House staffer is found to have had sex on a government rooftop, or when Medicare is found to have wasted prodigious taxpayer sums, again. But much IG work is like Freedom of Information Act requests: typically non-newsworthy efforts that burden government departments – yet are considered a necessary bureaucratic cost of transparency and accountability. Are the watchdogs a bargain? Currently, there are 73 IGs, one for most every federal department, with a collective annual budget of about $2.5 billion.
Some call them toothless tigers. But IGs represent consumer retail democracy for better or worse, with a lot of apparently unavoidable waste built in.
Every IG has a hotline – a general term for the phone numbers and email addresses by which anyone within the government or without can lodge complaints. And tens of thousands people do, often anonymously. Between October and March 2019, for example, the Social Security Administration’s IG received 161,000. Each of those has to be screened and vetted before a full-fledged investigation into the complaint can be green-lighted.
At the Interior Department, the process includes “special agents and analysts who interview complainants, review documents, and make recommendations,” said Nancy DiPaolo, director of external affairs for Interior’s IG.
Sometimes complainants have no idea who they’re calling. “We’ve even gotten sewer complaints,” said an official in the General Services Administration’s IG office. But officials offer this common refrain: “We take everything very seriously.”
Numbers of complaints ebb and flow, and appear to be up in some departments. In prior comparable periods, Social Security tended to get between 30,000 and 50,000 hotline complaints, not the more than triple those numbers it’s seen more recently. Between April and September 2018, Interior’s IG office, which has about 265 employees, received 1,126 complaints – about six complaints a day. But it opened only 37 full-scale investigations – including the hallway “urination” claim. In prior periods, Interior got closer to 500 complaints.
Complaints vary from department to department and, as with Interior’s, most are not deemed to merit full investigations. Often, they are referred to other IGs under whose jurisdiction they properly fall.
Officials reason that without the hotline system, important allegations would go unreported. “It also allows complainants, who may be hesitant to report wrongdoing for fear of retaliation, to report their concerns anonymously,” said an official at GSA.
And unsubstantiated investigations are “just part of the job,” said DiPaolo. It is not a concern that the anonymous hotline encourages frivolous allegations, she noted, “because that’s the point of either vetting things or actually investigating them.” DiPaolo did not comment on how allegations are vetted.
Many cases are, of course, serious and even criminal. In one, a woman who had sold land through an Interior Department program said she’d never gotten her check. When the Inspector General investigated, it turned out that she’d simply lied to get another check.
In fact, after she filed her claim, the government found out that the check had been cashed. Later, she pleaded guilty in Montana to mail fraud and was sentenced to two years of probation.
In another Interior case, the IG confirmed that an employee “lied about her cancer diagnosis, forged medical records, falsified documents, and abused her own sick leave and leave donated by coworkers.” There was no evidence that the employee had cancer, and she forged medical notes to take leave.
Unsubstantiated allegations, on the other hand, are often a result of miscommunication, grievance and “he said, she said” situations, said Kathryn E. Newcomer, director of the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy & Public Administration. When IGs look into such allegations, “I’m not surprised that they could go either way.”
For example, if a female supervisor fires a male employee, he might feel gender discrimination was the cause and make an allegation.
In a recent case, a biologist at the National Park Service was accused of coercing at least two interns into sex. But the IG found no evidence of such misconduct.
According to DiPaolo, complaints of federal workers viewing pornography at work, often played up in the media, are not taken lightly. Last year an investigation found that an employee allegedly caught looking at Ukrainian porn sites was involved in exposing more than usual; he was “exposing systems to foreign hackers.”
Still, IGs could probably reduce the number of unsubstantiated cases, said James Bovard, an investigative journalist who’s researched inspectors general, “if they had a higher standard of evidence prior to launching an investigation.”
“You should probably have some very solid stuff before you pull someone in for questioning,” he said.
Yet experts including John Hudak, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, believe that the substantial number of investigations that come up with nothing shouldn’t be a big concern. “If every OIG investigation turned up something wrong, it would probably suggest that an IG is only taking the slam-dunk cases,” he said.
Correction
3:55 PM Eastern, August 29, 2019
An earlier version of this article misspelled the last name of the investigative journalist quoted. He is James Bovard, not Bouvard.
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