Corporate and Government Programs to Address Employee Concerns

Some companies and government agencies in Alaska have established purportedly confidential programs to address employee concerns about waste, fraud, violations of law and/or mismanagement. Employee concerns programs, ombudsman programs and/or hotlines are some of the more common names of these programs.

Alyeska, for example, claims to have made great strides toward altering a corporate culture that historically has been extremely hostile to whistleblowers. Alyeska established an ombudsman program in 1993, which was replaced in 1995 by the Employee Concerns Program. Some observers regard Alyeska's programs as little more than "window dressing." High-level managers in the employee concerns program, for example, have a record of refusing to consider employee concerns brought to their attention. Equally disturbing, Alyeska's implementation of its employee concerns program has discouraged openness and accountability.

A program evaluation conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in early 1997 confirmed these and other flaws in Alyeska's program. The evaluation found that half of the pipeline workers still fear reprisals for speaking the truth about problems on the pipeline. Although Alyeska recently took steps to improve its program, it will be some time before it is possible to evaluate the effectiveness of these reforms.

Another example is the toll-free hotline operated by the Joint Pipeline Office (JPO), a collaborative effort of 11 state and federal oversight agencies. The hotline is supposed to allow for anonymous reporting of concerns about the pipeline, and also provides access to an Employee Concerns Specialist. Although JPO was created to monitorthe operations of Alyeska, it has exhibited a surprisingly unsympathetic attitude toward Alyeska whistleblowers. It often has failed to protect employee confidentiality by sharing names with Alyeska, making the employees easy targets for reprisals. The BLM evaluation mentioned above was also very critical of JPO's handling of employee concerns. As in the Alyeska example, JPO responded by taking steps to improve its program but the effectiveness of its reforms will not be known for some time. The problems confronting Alyeska's and JPO's programs are not uncommon among internal corporate and government employee concerns programs. These programs are too often undermined by the conflict of interest inherent when an institution is responsible for investigating and disclosing its own misconduct. Internal oversight programs also face a number of recurring problems, including violations of confidentiality.