8th Issue: Food
Handler Cards – A Failure of Culture
Some compliance violations
are so small and easily fixed that there is no reason to consider them
particularly worthy of whistleblowing. But
when small problems go unresolved, they can reflect a systemic illness in the
company’s culture.
Beginning in January 2012,
the State of California required that people who handle food at most food
service facilities hold a State-issued Food Handler Card, which could be obtained
after successfully completing a brief on-line course on basic food safety and
paying the small fee. Two compliance questions
faced HomeFirst: (a) was its shelter a food service facility covered by the law
and (b) who among the employees, clients, and volunteers working in the shelter
kitchen were required to obtain Food Handler Cards?
At the end of February 2014,
I planned a quick review of the shelter kitchen compliance. As I researched the legal basis for the TB
testing that we required of our kitchen workers, I discovered the Food Handler
Card requirement. My conversation with a Santa Clara County food inspector confirmed that we violated the rule because none of our
workers had the card. I described to the
Chief Program Officer my understanding that some volunteers and a group of clients
that worked in the kitchen must have the cards.
Half-kidding, she told me to stop finding problems. Then, more seriously, she claimed that the requirement
would overload our volunteer manager and could reduce contributions, replaying the
argument against licensing the shelter that our CEO Jenny had made six months
earlier: convenience trumped concerns over legality. I wrote up my usual internal report recommending
corrective actions.
During a contentious May
Finance Committee meeting on compliance, I realized that I had no updated
information on this particular violation.
After the meeting, I visited the shelter to check on documentation and
found that most kitchen workers still did not have Food Handler Cards. We still violated the law. When Jenny learned of my follow-up visit from
the site manager, she described surprise compliance visits as unacceptable. I complained to the Audit Chair that Jenny
was violating our whistleblowing policy, but he would take no position on the
matter. The next day Jenny wrote up a reprimand that referred to my improper shelter visit.
Corporate culture can
overwhelm even a robust compliance program like HomeFirst’s[1]. This case touched on the company’s code of
ethics, its contract compliance program, and its Audit and Finance Committees which
were charged with overseeing the compliance program. I had not made much of the violation when I first
identified it; it was not major, and I expected it to be corrected promptly. After management’s failure to correct the
problem, all the other violations, the disclosures I had made, the push-back I had
received, and the responses from Jenny and the Audit Chair to this issue, I decided
that more than an isolated violation was involved.
A week later on the morning
of the day I was fired, I called in my complaint to the County Department of
Environmental Health. The department’s
website indicated that complaints could be made only by voice message. A week later, after receiving no response to
my call, I filed a public records request.
The department replied that they had no record of my complaint. The day after I provided additional
information, the department interviewed the shelter manager, who told them that
everything was in order or would be soon.
The department’s report concluded that they found no major violations.
The absence of food handler
cards represented the least financially serious of the violations I disclosed
and one so trivial that Bok and de
George could see no justification for a whistleblower’s disloyalty. The enforcement process possibly worked as
well as it could, given the County’s limited resources and the nearly 8,000
restaurants it had to police. While a
persnickety whistleblower might trouble over the shelter manager’s
representation of correction, the company’s eventual attempt to comply with the
law may well have qualified as “good enough” even if it fell short at the time
I rediscovered the problem and was fired.
After all of the compliance issues
I had pressed, perhaps both Jenny and I were primed to overreact. Or perhaps the issue was not a particular violation
but a way of doing business, and our responses were consistent with our roles.
Lesson for the whistleblower:
a complaint to authorities necessarily addresses a specific legal violation,
but the real problem needing correction may be cultural and reflected in
multiple violations, some of which may seem immaterial in themselves.
[1] Bazerman, Max H.
and Ann E. Tenbrunsel. Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What’s Right
and What to Do about It. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press. 2011
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