In a recent letter addressed to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) Commissioner Douglas Shulman, Senator Charles Grassley expressed “extreme disappointment” with the IRS’s Whistleblower Program. The current IRS Whistleblower Program was established as part of the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006.  Under the program, individuals who detect underpayment [...]

A Camden, New Jersey, high-school principal who blew the whistle on school officials’ rigging of student test scores was ordered reinstated by an arbitrator, reported the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday.  In a lawsuit filed in New Jersey Superior Court in 2007, Joseph Carruth, formerly the principal at Dr. Charles E. Brimm Medical Arts High School in [...]

Almost exactly thirteen months after its introduction into the Senate, S. 743, the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2012 (“WPEA”), passed the Senate by unanimous consent on May 8, 2012.  The bill would significantly expand the scope of whistleblower protections for federal employees, and, if its companion bill passes the House, will help to give [...]

A chemist for the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) was reinstated earlier this month by the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (“MSPB”), the administrative review board that adjudicates many employment-related disputes within the federal government.  The MSPB found that an administrative law judge (“ALJ”) had erred when it dismissed the case of Cate Jenkins, the EPA [...]

Congressman Edward Markey, D-Mass., sent a letter on Wednesday to Greg Jaczko, the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (“NRC”), urging him to investigate allegations of retaliation against NRC staff who report nuclear safety violations.  The letter comes after Congressman Markey, senior member of the Energy and Commerce Committee and an advocate for increased nuclear [...]

The United States Office of Special Counsel (“OSC”) sent a letter to the White House and Congress yesterday urging more effective oversight of air safety on the part of the Department of Transportation’s (“DOT’s”) Federal Aviation Administration (“FAA”).  In a press release, the OSC noted that the FAA has one of the highest rates of [...]

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (“OSHA”) ordered the Tennessee trucking company, Mark Alvis, Inc., to reinstate a former employee and pay him more than $180,000 in back pay, interest, and compensatory and punitive damages after determining that the company had violated the employee’s rights under the whistleblower provisions of the [...]

Thanks to a 2012 report from the General Services Administration (“GSA”) Inspector General, Brian D. Miller, taxpayers now know how the GSA has been spending their tax dollars:  on lavish indulgences such as a nearly $1 million conference in Las Vegas in 2010.  While Mr. Miller’s report cannot restore the wasted monies to taxpayers, some [...]

This week big business signaled its intention to stymie the progress set in motion by the Administrative Review Board’s (“ARB”) ground-breaking decision in Sylvester v. Parexel last year. On April 30, 2012, the world’s largest business federation – the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – submitted an Amicus Curiae brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals [...]

On April 27, 2012, the Administrative Review Board (“ARB” or the “Board”) of the U.S. Department of Labor reaffirmed its policy of declining requests to reduce attorney’s fee awards merely because the amount requested is disproportionately larger than the damages recovered by a whistleblower.  This ruling underscores the significance of whistleblower’s access to counsel, and [...]