Blowing That Whistle

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Page 3

SNIPPETS (Column)

Blowing That Whistle

By MARC HAEFELE

We just received a notice for a webinar touting a tutorial from a couple of largish New York law firms—Morvillo, Abramovitz, Grand Iason Anello & Bohrer PC and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP plus an assistant counsel from Merck & Co. This March 28 event offers “answers and advice on the best way to respond to whistleblower allegations.” The gentle implication being that this webinar might be more focused on issues of how to deal with a whistleblower than how to be one. It’s as good an indicator of the general success of the whistleblower’s practice as you might want to find.

This is perfectly fair. The whistleblower, in his her modern iteration, emerged about a quarter century ago. By the early ’90s, under its then-director Ben Bycel, the new City Ethics Commission installed its own Whistleblower Hotline answering machine, where any city employee or official (or maybe just anyone) could vent suspicions of wrongdoing in any city department.

There is still some question of whether the machine ever paid its electric bill. In any case the Commission has since devolved into a watchdog with a specialized taste for campaign finance irregularities. Which are perfectly fine in their way, but not what most taxpayers think of as the greater ethical enormities of local misgovernment. Too bad. There still doesn’t seem to be a safe and secure method by which, say, a paramedic could meaningfully and effectively complain to the city about slow ambulance response times. Or, rolling things back more than a decade, the Rampart Division Scandal.

An older press release here (My goodness, can it really be from March of last year?) takes a more aggressive stance on the whistleblower topic, and makes a very generous assessment of its success. As you might expect, since the release is for a book called “The Whistleblower’s Handbook.” Reading it, I realized how far whistleblowing matters have come since I last seriously covered the city Ethics Commission in the early ’00.

For one thing, there seems now to be something called the National Whistleblowers’ Center, and the book in question (a second edition, no less) is by its executive director Stephen Martin Kohn. Mr. Kohn makes a rather strong case for the institution, quoting statistics that suggest “56 percent of all workers admit to witnessing serious misconduct at work” and about half of them take a step toward reporting it. Most attempts to do so fail, and some have dire consequences to the whistleblower. Like, losing a job or even a profession.

Mr. Kohn has a list of rules of what to do and not to do if you feel like blowing a whistle on someone. Starting with “Understanding the Maze” and ending with the possible rewards, including qui tam matters. (also a warning from the Wall Street Journal :”Don’t let your boss see you with this book.”)

Surprisingly, successful whistleblowers seem to have become an affinity category of their own; like dog lovers or science fiction fans, they even gather to talk shop. What a various lot they are, too. There is tall, ivy-looking William Sejour, whose diligence, so I read, helped establish that the First Amendment can even apply to federal environmental officials, and there is Linda Tripp. Surely I don’t need to tell you about her. Many others besides appear on Kohn’s web pages. They all look pretty happy, in the photos. Happier, perhaps, than the litigants on the other side.

I’d think that if they are wise, Morvillo, Paul et al. might therefore do well to pick up a few copies of Kohn’s book for their webinar. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.