Public Purchaser Wins Whistle Blower Case

 

Beau Grant’s column, “Is Public Procurement Being Sold Out?,” page 44, June 2005, prompted Janet A. Garrison, CPPO, FCPM, to
e-mail her whistle blower tale to Government Procurement.
“I fell into a “political power” personal profit trap on a bid, and it cost me my job and a lot of stress dealing with the aftermath,” Garrison says.
The following article was written by Bill Cotterell, Political Editor, Tallahassee (FL) Democrat:

The Law Can Protect Honest State Workers

As court awards go, $34,000 is not much. But Janet Garrison’s victory in Leon County Circuit Court is important for state employees. Besides personal vindication and compensation for her firing by the Florida Department of Education, the jury asserted that Florida’s “whistle-blower law” really can protect honest employees.

State workers have always feared for their jobs when they see waste, fraud, and mismanagement. The keep-your-head-down atmosphere of the current administration has made things more intimidating. But sometimes the good guys win.

Garrison got in the way of a Florida Department of Education (DOE) plan to privatize about 174 jobs in the Office of Student Financial Assistance two years ago. A 15-year purchasing agent with sterling job ratings, she believed the bidding process tilted toward Sallie Mae, the giant company that provides federally guaranteed student loans for about 7 million borrowers nationwide.
Garrison sent an e-mail to DOE officials, requesting that her name be taken off an Invitation to Negotiate (ITN). She said she requested a pre-bid conference for all companies that might want to bid on the state’s business, but no meeting was held, and that two DOE officials who wrote the ITN were meeting with pro-spective vendors.

The day after she sent the e-mail, Garrison said former DOE Chief Operating Officer Larry Wood told her, “You’ve made a public record now. You’ve blown the whole deal” by creating a document that could be cited by losing bidders, if they filed a protest. The next day, Garrison said her computer password was disabled and she was notified that her “services were no longer needed.”
As a Selected Exempt employee, she wasn’t legally entitled to a reason. But if [her termination] was a staff reduction, her lawsuit mentioned that another woman was brought in to replace her. And if her performance was slipping, the suit cited a long line of above-expectation job ratings, including a commendation for “saving the agency $400,000 on a food and nutrition bid” just six days before she was out of work.

According to Garrison, her suspicions were aroused because Sallie Mae hired 48 new employees and advertised in Panama City for 49 more—just as the privatization plan went out for proposals.

Her attorney, Marie Mattox, says it took a jury less than an hour to sustain Garrison’s whistle-blower status and award pay for the eight months she was out of work.

Mattox, who handles a lot of state-employment cases, said it’s significant that Garrison went about it the right way. The whistle-blower law only protects employees who report misfeasance or malfeasance to their department’s Inspectors General (IG)—with a signed, written notice—or to the highest-ranking available official who can solve the problem.

Simply telling your supervisor, or your boss’s boss, isn’t enough, Mattox says.
“The big trap for a lot of employees is how they make the disclosure,” Mattox says. “The Florida Supreme Court has said that ‘the statute could not be more broadly written’ to protect whistle-blowers, but where they go wrong is in not reporting something to the IG or to someone who can remedy the problem.”
Regarding Grant’s “indicators of potential procurement ‘politicization,’” Garrison agrees wholeheartedly and stresses the need for public procurement professionals to be aware and beware of “power politicians.”