Terrance Peterson was trained in the military to report wrongdoing, regardless of the consequences.

That code of integrity did not serve him well after he reported wrongdoing to the Department of Veterans Affairs inspector general.

In January 2013, Peterson complained to the IG about unsanitary conditions at the Wilmington, Del., VA hospital where he worked. He had filed previous complaints that veterans faced needless delays in getting care.

The IG turned Peterson’s charges over to agency administrators so they could investigate themselves. They found they did nothing wrong and the case was dropped.

What followed was a year of retaliation, the former Navy and Marine medic says.





Watchdogs, lapdogs and attack dogs

A four-part series by the Washington Examiner examining the state of the inspectors general.

Part One: IGs form front line of war on waste and fraud, but weak links remain

Part Two: Temporary IGs subject to agency manipulators seeking to cover up wrongdoing

Today: Bad things happen to whistleblowers when watchdogs become attack dogs

Part Four: Few fixes available for problem IGs

Click here to see a summary of the series and find more resources.



Hospital administrators claimed Peterson was a hothead prone to complaining to outside agencies.

Peterson was transferred out of the dialysis unit, the one he complained about.

He was accused of making threats against his boss, a doctor who ran the department, and was directed to attend anger management sessions.

He denies ever threatening anyone, but hospital administrators referred the allegation to the IG, which sought criminal charges. The U.S. Attorney’s Office refused to prosecute.

Finally, in April 2014, Peterson was fired.

“It was a disappointment,” said Peterson, a Navy veteran who served with a Marine unit in the Persian Gulf in the late 1980s. “One of the core things you are taught in the military is to take care of your brother. That stays with you. How can I wear a uniform and then cower to the VA mentality?”

What happened to Peterson is not unusual, according to outside watchdogs, members of Congress and a review of recent media reports involving whistleblower retaliation at numerous federal agencies.

The pattern is predictable:

The whistleblower reports wrongdoing to the inspector general.

The IG does nothing except forward the complaint to the agency.

The agency retaliates against the whistleblower.

“They never listen to whistleblowers,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, a longtime champion of protecting those who expose agency wrongdoing. “They are punishing whistleblowers instead of considering them good, patriotic Americans. They are treated like a skunk at a picnic.”

A recent twist is that agencies are now using IGs to retaliate against whistleblowers or silence them by threatening criminal investigations rather than just personnel actions, said Tom Devine, legal director for the nonpartisan Government Accountability Project.

Criminal investigations conducted by the IGs mean agencies do not have to contend with complex personnel rules or whistleblower protection laws, Devine said.

Trumped-up charges can be anything from accusing the whistleblower of making threats to disclosing classified information, Devine said. The effect is intimidation.

“The IGs are the hatchet men for that phenomenon,” Devine said. “It’s cheap. It’s easy. You can’t lose and the chilling effect is far greater than firing someone. You may scare other employees by firing a whistleblower. You terrorize them by prosecuting a whistleblower. And the IGs have been the natural vehicles for this.”

Inspectors general are supposed to be independent watchdogs inside federal agencies. Their job is to root out waste, fraud and corruption while protecting the whistleblowers who come to them with information about wrongdoing.

But too often the watchdogs become attack dogs by turning their investigations against whistleblowers at the behest of the agency, or threatening their own internal investigators who balk at hiding evidence of management misconduct from Congress or the public, critics say.

IGs often provide little protection to those who come to them with reports of wrongdoing, disclosing their names to their bosses and dismissing complaints of retaliation as unfounded or outside the IG’s jurisdiction.

Problems don’t get fixed and the whistleblower winds up on the department’s “enemies list,” said Chris Farrell, director of research and investigation at Judicial Watch, a nonpartisan watchdog group.

“They are frequently demonized or labeled as a malcontent or as a non-team player,” Farrell said. “They are frequently accused of doing things they haven’t done.

"They [agency executives] refer people to mental health counseling to say, ‘You are clearly having some kind of a breakdown and you need to go see a psychiatrist’ just for opposing the party line. I don’t know what’s more Stalinist than that,” he said.

Inspectors general have been accused in recent years of retaliating against agency whistleblowers or their own investigators at the departments of Commerce, Defense, Interior, State and Homeland Security.

A half-dozen employees of the Commerce IG filed retaliation complaints in 2012 and 2013, according to congressional investigators. In 2013, the Office of Special Counsel rebuked Commerce IG Todd Zinser for coercive tactics used by his top deputies to secure gag orders against four departing employees.

At the Defense Department, acting IG Lynne Halbrooks last year threatened the security clearance of the top executive in her office in charge of whistleblower protection. His offense was to provide a draft report to a congressional oversight committee, which was later obtained by the Project on Government Oversight, an independent watchdog group.

The draft stated that former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta disclosed secret information to the writers of the film “Zero Dark Thirty,” which depicted the killing of Osama bin Laden. That statement was scrubbed from the final IG report issued in June 2013.

But the agency with the worst record of attacking whistleblowers is the Department of Veterans Affairs, according to a June 2014 letter from Carolyn Lerner, head of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.

Lerner’s letter to President Obama described “a years-long pattern of disclosures from whistleblowers and their struggle to overcome of a culture of non-responsiveness” at VA.

Lerner did not single out the IG for criticism. But numerous VA whistleblowers whose cases have been exposed by the Washington Examiner and other media say they initially took their charges of wrongdoing to the IG, which either did not pursue them or turned them over to agency administrators to investigate.

Dr. Sam Foote filed a complaint with the IG in October 2013 alleging schedulers at the Phoenix VA hospital where he worked used phony appointment lists to hide long delays in care.

For years, similar allegations had been reported by other whistleblowers at medical facilities across the country. Though the IG repeatedly confirmed the improper practices, it routinely dismissed them as errors caused by inadequate training, not deliberate manipulation.

Foote said the IG showed little interest in his charges, so he went to the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, which publicly disclosed them in April.

A subsequent IG investigation ordered by the committee eventually confirmed Foote’s charges. Yet in its final report, issued in August, acting Inspector General Richard Griffin downplayed the notion that patients were harmed by the widespread manipulation, saying he could not “conclusively assert” any patients died as a result.

The final report also noted Foote did not provide the names of 40 patients he claimed may have died while stuck on phony wait lists. The IG investigation confirmed 293 patients at the Phoenix hospital died while waiting for care but did not include that figure in its final report.

During a September House veterans’ committee meeting, Griffin released a transcript of Foote’s initial interview with investigators, asking that it be made a part of the official record.

The committee refused to do so, citing concerns that it could have a chilling effect on future whistleblowers. Copies of the transcript were stacked on a table outside the hearing room before the committee hearing began.

Foote said Griffin was clearly trying to discredit him over details, even though the substance of his allegations was confirmed and triggered a nationwide scandal that led to the resignation of former VA Secretary Eric Shinseki.

Foote branded the final IG report a “whitewash,” saying “it was totally retaliatory. They were definitely taking a shot at me. I don’t think the IG was ever on my side. I looked at them as adversarial from the start.”

Griffin refused requests for an interview.

Peterson, who is challenging his termination from the Wilmington VA hospital, said he was never worried about the IG’s criminal investigation because he knew the charges were not true.

After the IG turned against him, Peterson sought help from the Office of Special Counsel, which is supposed to protect whistleblowers, and from his federal employee union.

Union officials did nothing, he said. OSC dropped Peterson’s case and told him to seek relief from the Merit Systems Protection Board, which handles personnel disputes.

Peterson’s claim of wrongful termination is pending at MSPB.

He said he does not regret blowing the whistle to the IG despite being fired and threatened with prosecution as a result.

“Once you see the truth, you can’t shake it,” he said. “If I don’t say anything, I’m just as guilty as they are.”