A letter from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) sent Monday urged DOE to review the safety culture at the new Hanford vitrification plant.  The Hanford Nuclear Reservation is the most important environmental cleanup program in the nation. It seeks to prevent 56 million gallons of radioactive sludge from contaminating the nearby Columbia River.  [...]

In the case of Ameristar Airways, Inc., et al v. Administrative R, (5th Cir. 2011) the Department of Labor Administrative Review Board (“ARB”) has affirmed its earlier decision to declare Ameristar’s Airways, Inc.’s 2003 termination of its Director of Operations to be retaliatory.  However, the ARB remanded the decision for reconsideration of calculation of back [...]

On August 8, 2011 a Maryland Federal Judge granted summary judgment on liability to two former ADT Security Services Inc. ruling that their provision of documents deemed confidential by ADT in support of a wage-and-hour investigation was activity protected from retaliation under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The plaintiffs, Sharon Randolph and Tami Thompson, worked [...]

The Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has ordered Norfolk Southern Railway Co. to pay $122,199 in compensatory and punitive damages as well as reasonable attorneys’ fees in a whistleblower retaliation case.  The whistleblower, a railroad employee, was injured while removing a spike from a rail line on May 13, 2009, but [...]

In Furland v. American Airlines, the Department of Labor Administrative Review Board (“ARB”) upheld the finding of an administrative law judge in this Wendell H. Ford Aviation Investment and Reform Act for the 21st Century (AIR21) case that a pilot engaged in protected activity under the federal aviation whistleblower law when he refused to fly after becoming ill from airline food he had eaten on an earlier flight, and when he later complained about the airline’s attempts to pressure him to fly when he was unfit to fly.

According to the Internal Revenue Service’s “Fiscal Year 2010 Report to the Congress on the Use of Section 7623,” a report that the IRS recently released to Congress, more tax whistleblowers are coming forward and, under new whistleblower program rules, they are likely to see faster results from the IRS Whistleblower office. Not only did whistleblowers increase by 30 percent between fiscal years 2009 and 2010, but also total whistleblower rewards more than tripled from $5.8 million to $18.7 million. The IRS pays between 15 and 20 percent of recovered taxes, interest and penalties collected from disputes exceeding $2 million. Before the passage of the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006, the IRS could choose whether or not to pay whistleblowers – today, under Section 7623(b), the payout is mandatory.

In Hasan v. Enercon Services, Inc., a nuclear whistleblower case brought under the Energy Reorganization Act, the complainant, an engineer, alleged that Enercon Services, Inc., repeatedly failed to hire him for a number of engineering positions because he had prevailed a few years earlier in a whistleblower complaint against another company.  The ALJ dismissed the [...]

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced Monday that it will implement measures to significantly strengthen its whistleblower protection program.  OSHA is responsible for enforcing 21 whistleblower protection statues which protect workers from retaliation when they report on their employers’ violation of airline, commercial motor carrier, consumer product, environmental, financial reform, food safety, health [...]