Originally published August 19, 2006
Inspectors general need independence
Somebody finally asked the question I've been pondering for the last few weeks. It happened during a Florida Public Radio interview of Corrections Secretary Jim McDonough. The caller, a Corrections employee, asked: What do we do if the next head of our agency turns out to be ethically challenged? Who do we, as his employees, turn to?
I've worked for the Florida Department of Corrections for almost 20 years, so I have a vested interest in the question. When I learned our former secretary, James Crosby, decided to trade his integrity and the reputation of his agency for around $130,000 in kickbacks, the biggest surprise to me was the low amount for which he sold us all out. The remarkably accurate rumor mill at Corrections had known this was coming for some time. The only question that remained was how much.
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Imagine you're a mid-level Corrections employee and someone higher in your chain of command pressures you to complete timesheets for a phantom employee who never comes to work but shows up for the softball games and swings a mean bat. (I use this example because the woman it happened to was a former co-worker, which made it easy to see how this could have happened to any of us.) Whom do you bring that complaint to?
Do you go to the agency inspector general's (IG's) office, the one charged with investigating wrongdoing within an agency? I wouldn't if I thought my complaint might lead to the secretary's office, because the IG works for the secretary - he's the guy who signs the IG's paycheck, does his job evaluation and hires and fires him.
I am not impugning the integrity of those in the IG's office; I'm questioning why they are put in this untenable, no-win position in the first place. I recently learned that the agency IG can report independently to the IG in the governor's office in certain cases, but assuming that most employees are aware of this “bypass,” and assuming that the process would go off without a hitch, may be more of a leap of faith than most of us would be willing to take with our careers, not to mention our families.
Do you go to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement? That could be a problem when your secretary and FDLE's commissioner are (at the time) personal friends, to the point where your secretary hired the FDLE commissioner's son to work at his agency.
Do you go directly to the governor's office yourself? I used to work in the secretary's office years ago, and it was not uncommon for the governor's office to refer complaints of this nature back to the agency's IG office.
This oversight issue is not just a Corrections problem, but a state government problem. The previous chairman of the Parole Commission, Jimmie Henry, is finishing up a three-year prison sentence for grand theft from his own agency for falsifying travel and expense records. Florida A&M University had issues recently when the IG suggested he was put on administrative leave because he was investigating upper-level management.
A special prosecutor kicked FDLE off the boot-camp death case of Martin Lee Anderson when it was discovered that Commissioner Guy Tunnell had exchanged friendly e-mails with the agency he was supposed to be investigating. And soon our former Corrections secretary will be looking at prison bars from the other side when he's sentenced to a federal penitentiary.
In response to the radio caller who asked, Secretary McDonough indicated he supports a level of independence between the IG's office and the secretary's office, a fact he has emphasized to the IG staff - and that's a huge step in the right direction. But what if, after the next election, a new secretary comes in who has a different attitude and who chooses a different IG? Will we be back to where we started? Will the very structure of the organization be allowed to continue aiding and abetting those with criminal minds?
Wouldn't it make sense to have an inspector general's office completely independent of the agencies that they investigate? They could be located in a separate building, to help ensure the anonymity of whistleblowers, and placed under the supervision of a nonpartisan office. At the very least, there should be some checks and balances on the secretary's authority to fire an agency IG. Having an independent IG would give whistleblowers a fighting chance, and it might even stop a problem in its early stages, before somebody literally makes a federal case out of it.
Paula Bryant is a member of the Tallahassee Democrat citizen editorial board. Contact her at PTBryant@aol.com.