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| Attorney General Tong |
Every so often in Connecticut, the bureaucratic iron curtain parts and we are treated to headlines such as these: UConn prof wins $736,000, gets job back after questioning school’s management and favoritism in ‘whistleblower’ suit and Connecticut Lottery to pay $450,000 in settlement of suit that arose after allegations to FBI.
Such stories have a
very short shelf life and generally do not result in creative solutions for
persistent and recurring problems. No one is hauled before a congressional
investigating committee, necessary reforms are easily shelved along with a momentary
embarrassment, and Connecticut Attorney General William Tong walks off the stage with a sardonic smile
pasted on his face, muttering “no comment.”
A payout follows, a
smothering blanket is thrown over the whole sordid mess, life resumes its
wayward course and, in the absence of a real solution to a long festering
problem, the whole cycle repeats itself.
The UConn professor was
awarded $736,000 by a judge who, remarkably, was able to reach a just finding solely
on the basis of evidence put before her in a case involving misadministration
at UConn, Connecticut’s holy-of-holies state supported university. The
professor, known in Connecticut parlance as a “whistleblower,” should be
awarded with the state’s equivalent of the national medal of freedom.
Whistlebowers are people working for state agencies who blow the whistle on agency heads for unethical and possible illegal behavior. They are sometimes ruthlessly punished or hounded out of a job with the assistance of the state Attorney General, whose office is statutorily obligated to act as a defense attorney in legal actions for state agents and agencies that whistleblowers blow the whistle on.
Superior Court Judge
Susan Peck, according to the story in a Hartford paper, rendered a
non-ambiguous decision favoring the UConn professor.
She found that
“former business school Dean Paul Christopher Earley eliminated Weinstein’s
position after Weinstein persisted in expressing concern that cost cutting
measures by Earley in the school’s business accelerator program could
jeopardize federal funding and that Earley allegedly made decisions that
benefitted his wife, Elaine Mosakowski, a tenured business professor who ran
one of the accelerators... Peck awarded Weinstein about $736,000, concluding he
was effectively fired by Earley in retaliation for the concerns he raised… The
comprehensive, 58-page decision raises
questions about the effectiveness of UConn’s internal ethics and compliance
agency, the Office of Audit Compliance and Ethics, which was established in
2006 to investigate compliance issues and advise employees.”
Be it noted – Peck’s
decision was rendered eleven (11) years after the professor had courageously
blown his whistle.
Corruption, as it is
commonly understood by most people, puts down roots and flourishes in Connecticut’s
web of complex and bewildering state administrative processes.
The professor did contact the humorously named Office of Audit Compliance and Ethics, which predictably proceeded to ignore his complaint. Did the ethics office find that UConn’s firing of the professor was unethical -- for having blown the whistle at an improper and, be it noted, unethical firing of a whistleblower?
Ha! And Ha!, Ha!
This is not the
first time that the office
of state ethics had stood in
the way of an ethical resolution to a whistleblower complaint.
This professor had
the gumption and where-with-all to carry his case to court. More often than
not, complainants are forced to endure very expensive legal proceedings before
their complaints are justly – if ever – resolved. They are simply battered
about in an impossibly complex process that both impoverishes and exhausts
them. And, should they prevail – after eleven (11) years of shuttlecock
“justice” -- the resolution of their cases are effectively smothered in a “plea
bargain” proceeding,
Money, in the end,
is awarded for silence. And the judgments of courts are buried in judicial
morgues, never again to see the light of day. The tortured victim is
compensated, and those who tortured him never feel the lash, likely because
they are well appointed public servants who have a strong wind at their back –
over 200
attorneys paid to square
circles in the Attorney General’s office.
If the problem is
that victimizers are over-represented and the victims under-represented – and
that is exactly the problem – the answer to the problem is to recreate in
Connecticut an Inspector General’s
Office unattached to the executive department of government, fully independent,
armed with subpoena power and mandated to investigate whistleblower and citizen
complaints against state agents and agencies.
Connecticut’s
whistleblower statute specifically protects whistleblowers who have disclosed
such information to any employee of the Auditors of Public Accounts. According to
the Whistle
Blower statute, “The Auditors of Public Accounts shall review [whistleblower
complaints] and report their findings and any recommendations to the Attorney
General. Upon receiving such a report, the Attorney General shall make such
investigation as the Attorney General deems proper regarding such report and
any other information that may be reasonably derived from such report.”
However the Attorney
General is statutorily mandated to defend in court state agents and agencies.
So, the whistleblower statute itself absurdly assigns to the Attorney General’s
Office both prosecutorial and defense functions.
What could possibly
go wrong, and who among us would hire a defense attorney knowing that he was to
be both a defense attorney and a prosecutor in civil cases involving
accusations of impropriety or peculation?
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