After Whistleblowing

After Whistleblowing

To my mind, whistleblowing comes in three phases. 

The core phase is what we usually consider the whistleblowing project.  That includes observing what seems to be a legal or ethical violation.  Evidence is gathered, and the problem is described to management.  They may fix the problem.  Whether the problem is corrected or not, the discloser can suffer retaliations, beginning with ostracism and accelerating from there.  In response to the retaliations or to the organization’s failure to correct the wrong, the whistleblower discloses violations to external authorities.  If things go south, a lawsuit or other complaint follows.  Finally – perhaps as soon as a year, more often after 3-5 years, sometimes after 10 years or more – the issues are resolved.

Before the whistleblowing project can begin, though, preparations must be made.  The soil must be prepared.  The individual must gain the technical knowledge necessary to identify a violation.  She needs the ethical and legal awareness to believe that a violation should be corrected.  And, importantly, she must become sufficiently dissatisfied with the organization that she is willing to deal with the likely consequences of her actions.

Then after the project is resolved, there will be consequences.  Some will be financial.  The whistleblower may lose her job or miss out on raises or promotions because she has proven untrustworthy.  Her disloyalty will infect her relations at work.  Colleagues will know she could betray them again.  She may test some personal relations outside of work.  Marriages sometimes die from the experience.

Critically, I think, our understanding of the world changes as a result of our whistleblowing project.

C. Fred Alford[1] wrote that many of our tightly held beliefs must be abandoned as a result of our whistleblowing.  Among them:

-          The individual matters

-          Law and justice can be relied on

-          Ours is a government of laws, not men

-          Individual will not be sacrificed for the group

-          Loyalty isn’t equivalent to herd instinct

-          One’s friends will remain loyal if colleagues do not

-          The organization is not fundamentally immoral

-          It makes sense to stand up and do the right thing

-          Someone, somewhere, who is charge, knows, cares, will do the right thing

-          The truth matters, and someone will want to know it

-          If one is right and persistent, things will turn out all right in the end

-          Even if they do not turn out all right, other people will know, understand

-          The family is a haven in a heartless world

-          The individual can know the truth of all this and not become merely cynical

Discarding these ideas based on for-profit experiences seems easy to me.  I can quickly accept that greedy Enron management were douche bags.  Likewise, it is obvious that pond scum managers at Wells Fargo pressured employees to open unauthorized accounts and fired them if they complained.  And that managers at Uber were jerks, as Susan Fowler revealed.

Do-good nonprofits should be different.  But you don’t read as much about nonprofits and their whistleblowers.  They need a special hook to get people’s attention, like a former President.   

Sue Veres Royal was Executive Director at tiny Happy Hearts Fund, which rebuilds schools destroyed by natural disasters.  Her boss wanted to get Bill Clinton to its 2014 gala.  Clinton said okay to a lifetime achievement award as long as it came with a $500,000 honorarium paid to his foundation.  Royal objected to that and a litany of self-dealings by her boss. 

A couple of weeks after the gala, she was dismissed with a modest settlement.  She continued to scuffle with Happy Hearts attorneys.  A year after she left the charity, she wrote skeptically about charity fundraising, but she is back in the business, it seems. 

I developed my own cynicism about nonprofits following my HomeFirst experience.  Asked for money to help fire or flood victims, I want to know exactly what will be done with it.  I want accountability that HomeFirst did not provide.  And that few nonprofits offer.

I voted against a Santa Clara County bond for affordable housing because I don’t trust the County anymore after it mishandled HomeFirst’s $140,000 overbilling.  If I had the chance, I would vote against the Department of Housing and Urban Development because of the way it is dealing with HomeFirst’s $1.2 million overbilling.  I am skeptical of whatever the City of San Jose and the State of California might advocate.  I doubt the effectiveness of minimum wage guarantees from the State and local jurisdictions. 

I volunteer in a few organizations, but I don’t trust them as I once did.  I think it would be difficult to work in the nonprofit world again.

I look differently on friends who were not sufficiently sympathetic when I was deep into my struggles with HomeFirst.  Even though, three years later, I am amazed by my own egoism in those days.  Even though my whistleblowing tragedy no longer seems quite as meaning-filled as I once thought it was.  But as I downplay the significance of my act, I am still sickened by those who did nothing.

Whistleblowing can trigger many of life’s most stressful events – being fired at work, a drastically changed financial condition, a divorce, disruption of our usual habits.  If we get through those possibilities without too much damage, I think the biggest life-changing effect comes from our new understanding of the world.  Whether we like it or not.

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[1] Alford, C. Fred. Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. 2001. P. 49.