Just about everything connected to San Francisco's whistleblower program is broken, according to a scathing and disputed report released today by the city's civil grand jury.
Controller Ben Rosenfield is all smiles here, but he contends some of the report is
"unsupported by facts."
The report, which was quickly challenged by City Controller Ben Rosenfield, contends the program is deeply flawed, including botched confidentiality for whistleblowers and ineffective oversight.
"The whistleblower program could be described as [a] bad joke, except there's nothing funny about employees suffering abusive and career-killing treatment," the grand jury said in a statement accompanying the report.
Rosenfield, whose office oversees much of the program under a charter amendment that voters approved in 2003, said the grand jury offered some solid recommendations but "factual errors in the final report damage its overall utility."
The court-appointed civil grand jury, a citizens' investigative panel, found that the body that was supposed to oversee the complaint process, the Citizens' General Obligation Bond Oversight Committee, was apparently unaware of, or failed to recognize, its authority.
"The civil grand jury was astonished to learn an independent committee charged with overseeing the whistleblower program did nothing for seven years," the panel said in a statement. "Nothing happened because the committee didn't know it was in charge of oversight."
Rosenfield said that's simply not the case. The oversight committee has elected an official liaison for the whistleblower program every year since it came under its authority in 2004, most recently in January, Rosenfield said. The agenda for the committee's April 28 meeting also shows that the program was discussed then.
The grand jury report also found that whistleblowers were retaliated against, pointing to two doctors at Laguna Honda Hospital who filed whistleblower complaints against hospital management for conflicts of interest, improper compensation and misuse of the hospital's patient gift fund.
The same month the third complaint was filed, one of the doctors was fired. The second one resigned after alleging undue pressure from her superiors, the report said.
Retaliation complaints are handled by the city's Ethics Commission, not the controller, but the grand jury didn't interview the commission's executive director, John St. Croix.
The report appears to rely on only five individual complainants -- just 0.25 percent of the 2,228 complaints the controller's office has handled since taking over the program in 2004, Rosenfield wrote in response to the report.
Posted By: John Coté (Email) | July 11 2011 at 03:52 PM
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/cityinsider/detail?entry_id=92952#ixzz1SDguAmdN
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