When a call-taker for Houston’s 311 center accused colleagues of sexual harassment 15 years ago, she said the investigation quickly took a demoralizing turn.

Houston’s Office of Inspector General – the agency that was supposed to investigate misconduct – handed over her recording of the incident to a manager who shared it with the employees Sonia Rico was accusing, she said.

Rico’s complaint was deemed “unfounded” and the harassment continued, she said.

In the years that followed, Rico kept her job as a 311 operator while rising to serve as the president of the Houston Organization of Public Employees, the municipal employees union.

A subsequent inspector general investigation prompted the firing of the call center’s director over sexual harassment allegations. That did not change Rico’s opinion of the inspector general’s office.

“Nobody has had a good experience that I’ve talked to,” Rico said recently. “There is no trust, because the connection between OIG and management is close. So, you don’t know what you’re going to say is not going to come back and bite you.”

When it comes to corruption and misconduct inside city government, Houston’s Office of Inspector General is supposed to serve as the last line of defense. Its employees handled 465 complaints last year about everything from human resources matters to potential criminal fraud. However, Rico and some labor lawyers who handle cases against the city say the OIG has a spotty reputation among rank-and-file workers.

With 11 employees, the office commands a far smaller staff than similar agencies in other cities. It also keeps its reports secret — meaning the public is kept in the dark when it uncovers systematic problems.

Houston’s new mayor, John Whitmire, has promised to crack down on corruption and improve employee morale. Critics of the inspector general’s office such as Rico, whose union endorsed the mayor during last year’s election, say Whitmire has an opportunity to boost the independence and power of an office with scant legal authority.

Whitmire’s administration is actively reviewing potential changes, City Attorney Arturo Michel said. Those include shifting where the inspector general’s office is housed, providing investigators with more specialized training and changing the focus of its reports.

Closing cases

Independent arbitrators, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice also have dinged the inspector general’s work using words like “cursory” and “desultory.”

Those critiques occurred years ago, however. With much of the office’s work currently shrouded under a veil of secrecy, it is difficult to evaluate accusations that the OIG reflexively sides with the top brass at City Hall.

The office does not produce an annual report, rarely makes its findings public and takes the position that completed investigations do not have to be released under the Texas Public Information Act.

Longtime Inspector General Robin Curtis declined to be interviewed for this story, as she has in the past.

The Houston Landing filed a public records request for all closing letters the office sent last year to people who had filed complaints. Those letters and statistics provided by the city provide a first-of-its-kind look at the office caseload:

• Most of the time, complaints are closed without a full investigation. Of the 384 complaints closed last year, only 29 percent reached a formal conclusion.
• Overall, the office sustained complaints in only 13 percent of closed cases.
• Even when complaints are sustained, the inspector general’s office rarely tells tipsters whether or how the targets of investigations were disciplined.
• At least 73 percent of the complaints the Houston inspector general receives are from city employees. At least 36 percent of complaints involved allegations of workplace discrimination, harassment or other interpersonal conflict, according to a review of closing letters. Seven percent of complaints involved allegations of workplace violence, a major concern since the 2015 shooting of a waste management supervisor by one of his employees.
• While cracking down on waste, fraud and abuse often is seen as the bread-and-butter of inspector general offices, such investigations are the exception in Houston. Only 10 percent of the closing letters that revealed the nature of the complaint involved what broadly could be classified as waste, fraud or abuse, including nepotism, criminal allegations, procurement violations, timekeeping and overtime violations or improper gifts.
• Adding a dash of the absurd to the office’s workload, Houstonians occasionally use the inspector general as a catch-all complaint box. “The Office of Inspector General has completed its initial inquiry into your above-referenced complaint against the Houston Astros Major League Baseball team,” read a closing letter sent during the American League Division Series last year. “As the Houston Astros Major League Baseball team is not within OIG’s jurisdiction, we are closing this complaint as non-jurisdictional.”

Rico said there is nothing funny about the stories she hears from union members who file inspector general complaints.

All too often, city employees feel pressure from managers not to file complaints, she said. When they do, they may find themselves the target of subsequent investigations, despite rules against retaliation. Union members also complain about investigators who cannot contain their skepticism. The union is denied the right to observe interviews.

Rico pointed to the experience of Houston Public Library employees who filed complaints against the system’s director, Rhea Lawson.

Last year, at least three employees filed complaints against the leader of the library system, which suffers from allegations of a “hostile work environment” and a turnover rate double the city average. Of the closing letters that clearly identify Lawson as a target, two were closed without a full investigation. The third was judged to be unsustained.

‘Worthless’

Joe Ahmad, a plaintiff’s attorney who has represented municipal employees in discrimination lawsuits, said he discourages them from filing complaints with the inspector general in the first place.

“I have the unfortunate task of telling people that it’s worthless,” Ahmad said. “But more and more, candidly, they’re coming to me and telling me it’s worthless, and frankly, that’s not good.”

The office does not handle investigations involving police officers and handles only some complaints against firefighters.

Marty Lancton, president of the Houston Professional Fire Fighters Association, was less critical of the inspector general’s office than Rico, calling its work a “mixed bag.” However, he does see room for change.

“There needs to be clear lines of independence,” Lancton said. “I think that’s something that in past administrations has been a concern.”

Ahmad said the office’s flaws stem in part from its placement inside the city legal department, which is rooted in a debacle that drew unwelcome attention from critics up to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Department of Justice.

Created by Mayor Lee Brown in the late 1990s, the office initially was placed inside the Houston Police Department and staffed by officers.

“In the mayor’s mind, he said we need to come up with a process where people are not going to feel intimidated or pressured not to make complaints,” said Tim Oettmeier, a retired high-ranking Houston Police Department official who served as the second inspector general.

During Oettmeier’s tenure, the office drew headlines for tangling with council members and investigating allegations of bid-rigging. Oettmeier said he had “absolutely no problem” making his findings public.

Oettmeier had rotated out to another command in the late 2000s, when several female firefighters posted to the station near Bush Intercontinental Airport went to the Inspector General’s Office with allegations of grotesque sexual and racial harassment from their male colleagues.

The resulting inspector general investigation trained a magnifying glass on the women themselves. During the course of the investigation, deputy constables went to one firefighter’s house to obtain handwriting samples, with the goal of determining whether she faked sexist graffiti.

“They made her the target. It was very much investigate the accuser,” said Ahmad, who represented firefighter Jane Draycott.

In the end, the office concluded the women had been subjected to abuse. That was where the investigation ended, however. The office never released a written report and it never identified anyone to blame or policies to improve. 

In the midst of an outcry over the office’s handling of the investigation, Mayor Annise Parker in July 2010 moved the inspector general’s office out of the police department to the city legal department. In October of that year, she appointed Robert Doguim, a retired FBI agent who had gone undercover to expose bribery at City Hall in the 1990s, as the new inspector general.

In December 2010, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued a scathing report on how Doguim’s predecessor handled the firefighters’ complaints.

The inspector general’s investigations were “handled in a desultory manner not reasonably calculated to identify the perpetrator(s) or remedy the harassing conduct.” The city put more energy into blocking federal oversight than investigating the harassment at Station 54, the EEOC found.

Doguim’s appointment may have been intended to restore the office’s reputation, but he resigned after 14 months. Making it clear he was not quitting in protest, Doguim told reporters the office needed far more authority to investigate complaints.

Fundamental problems

While the inspector general’s office has generated fewer negative headlines for the city since its move to the legal department, Ahmad said he has not seen a leap in the quality of its investigations.

To Ahmad, one of the fundamental problems with the inspector general’s office is laid out at the top of the executive order that underlines its existence. According to that document, the city is its client.

“Remember, the legal department is responsible for defending the city,” Ahmad said. “You’re putting one set of lawyers, who has a fiduciary duty to protect their client, in charge of an investigation. Well, guess what? They’re going to find that their client didn’t do anything wrong.”

In a recent interview, Doguim said he has not kept track of developments with the office since he left. However, he still believes that any successful inspector general’s office needs three elements.

“Independence, proper level of authority and transparency,” Doguim said. “Without that, you’re just playing at it. It’s not going to be taken seriously, and it’s not going to have the positive effect that that function should have.”

Doguim said he took the inspectors general in three cities as his models when he started the job: Chicago, Miami and New Orleans.

All of those offices are established by written ordinances that attempt to guarantee their independence. By contrast, Houston’s office derives its authority from an executive order that can be changed overnight by a mayor.

In New Orleans, the inspector general answers to an independent board appointed by university professors. Its budget is pegged to a percentage of overall city spending, protecting it against retaliatory cuts.

New Orleans Inspector General Ed Michel described the ordinances governing his office as “pretty darn good. It gives us the ability to make sure that we have a budget, it gives us the ability to make sure that we have the resources to hire highly trained and highly skilled individuals that can do the job, and I report to a board that is not a government entity, which means there’s no conflict of interest.”

Despite Houston’s status as the fourth-largest city in the nation, the 11-person staff for its inspector general is dwarfed by other cities’ offices. New Orleans has 25 employees; Chicago has nearly 100.

While other offices often are staffed with specially-trained investigators, seven of 11 employees in Houston’s OIG are lawyers.

Other offices also take a vastly different approach to transparency. In New Orleans, the inspector general is required by statute to turn over annual reports and individual investigations to an independent oversight board, at which point they become public.

In Miami and Chicago, the inspector general websites are chockablock with annual reports and individual investigations. In Houston, the barebones inspector general’s website lists none.

“Nothing is going to change if it doesn’t see public light,” said Joe Ferguson, the former inspector general for Chicago. “That changes the accountability dynamic. If that is just an internal audit that gets handed off, nothing happens.”

Michel, the New Orleans inspector general, agreed.

“How are we going to stop future aspects of fraud, waste and abuse if no one knows about it?” he asked.

Under review

Those questions now have landed in the lap of Whitmire, who as Houston’s chief executive retains near-total power over how the office operates.

Whitmire spoke often on the campaign trail about his perception that former Mayor Sylvester Turner’s administration was rife with corruption and fraud.

He has not weighed in on any specific changes he would like to make to the inspector general’s office, which is a fraction of the size of much larger agencies like the Houston Airport System and Houston Public Works that have consumed his attention during his first few weeks.

However, the office is on the new administration’s radar in a way that it was not under former Mayor Sylvester Turner, according to City Attorney Arturo Michel. He said he has been reviewing how other cities structure their inspector general offices, including their chains of command.

“He wants to look at where OIG is housed. Whether it’s a standalone, whether it’s in city legal,” Michel said.

The city could also change what type of report the office produces, Michel said. Many reports mix factual findings with legal advice, making it difficult to release them to the public, Michel said.

The city also may try to broaden the scope of the inspector general’s reports so they focus more on systematic issues than the current investigations, which typically have a narrow focus.

Michel sounded a cautious note about increasing the staff, saying the city would look at “efficiencies” such as transferring responsibilities to human resources before expanding the size of the inspector general’s office.

As the city review continues, two developments could further center Whitmire’s attention on the tiny office.

First, in recent weeks, the inspector general’s office has taken on the high-profile case of several questionable emergency waterline repair contracts that are worth millions of dollars. Whitmire has spoken at City Council about his eagerness to see those investigations completed, so contractors who did the work they were supposed to do can get paid.

The city attorney said that in a break from the inspector general’s typical practice, the city could release the results of that investigation to the public.

“I won’t say that as a fact until it actually happens,” Michel said. “That is a question of how do you restore public confidence, or instill public confidence that the city is tackling the problem the right way?”

Meanwhile, Rico’s labor group is set to negotiate a new contract for municipal employees during the same period that Whitmire crafts next year’s budget. Rico says her union sees the need for reforms at the inspector general’s office and may push for some of them during the negotiations.

“There’s no trust in OIG, so I really think the whole system needs to be restructured,” she said.

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