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BPA hiring scandal fallout continues: Agency facing more lawsuits alleging discrimination and retaliation [The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.]
[September 16, 2014]

BPA hiring scandal fallout continues: Agency facing more lawsuits alleging discrimination and retaliation [The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.]


(Oregonian (Portland, OR) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Sept. 16--The legal fallout from Bonneville Power Administration's hiring scandal continues, even as federal power marketing agency says it has completed a remediation process designed to redress violations of federal hiring policies that became public last summer.



Two more military veterans have filed suit against BPA claiming the agency's violations of veterans' hiring preferences discriminated against their job applications.

BPA says it has received six veterans-related tort claim notices notifying it of potential lawsuits. Four veterans already have filed suit, and their attorney says he has as many as a dozen in the works. Those suits allege a pattern and practice of discrimination at the agency that was in place long before the two-and-half-year period when BPA acknowledges that its hiring practices were disadvantaging applicants.


Meanwhile, a former contract employee in one of BPA's maintenance garages filed suit in late August against the agency and the contractor that employed her. She claims she was terminated under the guise of a reorganization after she spoke out about harassment by her supervisors and made ethics complaints regarding accounting problems in her department.

BPA faces another suit from a long-term employee that was filed in July. That employee alleges managers manipulated the job description for an open position she had applied for in order to hire a younger, less qualified contractor for the job. She is claiming age and gender discrimination, and alleges the agency retaliated against her after she filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

BPA has reached a confidential settlement with one of the whistleblowers in the hiring scandal. A variety of employees claimed they were retaliated against for bringing the agency's hiring problems to light, and BPA spokesman Doug Johnson said the agency is in settlement talks with several of them.

Audits and investigations released last fall found massive dysfunction in BPA's human resources department, including what federal investigators called a "widespread and pervasive practice of manipulating the candidate rating process." The hiring violations disadvantaged both veterans -- who were denied preference rights in its recruiting -- and other qualified candidates whose applications didn't make it through BPA's screening process.

Bonneville has spent the last year reconstructing 1,259 hiring cases that were completed between November 2010 and June 2013 so it can redress the problems and reduce its potential legal exposure.

Of 403 cases involving external candidates, it has offered jobs to 135 candidates and has hired 47. Another 22 possible hires are in process and 66 either declined the agency's offer or didn't respond. BPA says the vast majority, but not all, of the external candidates offered jobs were veterans.

As part of the remediation, BPA is also maintaining a "priority consideration" list that also includes internal candidates -- either contractors or existing federal employees -- that may have been disadvantaged by a hiring error during the same period. It has not said how many candidates are on that list.

The agency has told those candidates that if an "equivalent position" to the one they applied for is identified during the next year, their applications will be reviewed and forwarded to the hiring manager if appropriate. BPA defines "equivalent" as a position having the same title, series, grade, promotion potential, duty location and tenure.

Some of those who received the priority consideration letters have told The Oregonian they believe the agency has effectively rendered its offer moot by including so many stipulations and applying a 12-month expiration. BPA says it is following federal guidelines.

Bonneville has retrained its entire human resources staff, replaced top staff and created a new executive position -- chief administration officer -- to assure the problems don't recur. Administrator Elliot Mainzer told employees in an e-mail last week that the agency had officially completed the reconstruction process. In the email, Mainzer quoted a letter he received last week from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management: "We are satisfied with the actions BPA has taken to address the required actions and case listings in our report. We now consider this evaluation closed." The lawsuits, however, may keep coming.

Only four veterans have filed suit in federal court so far. But Thomas Patton, the Lake Oswego attorney representing them, says BPA's remediation process only scratches the surface of the problem. His existing and pending complaints are a mix of internal and external candidates, and only a few have been contacted as part of the agency's remediation process. Some of them also fall outside the window of time that BPA's process is addressing.

Timm Johnson, a Coast Guard veteran and 12-year employee of Boeing, filed suit in mid August. The complaint says Johnson applied for three positions at BPA between 2005 and 2006: substation operator apprentice, facilities maintenance worker and carpenter.

Johnson claims he should have been awarded the highest score based on his experience and military service, but was a victim of BPA's discriminatory hiring practices and didn't get the jobs. He's seeking lost wages, $1 million in compensatory damages and attorneys fees.

Madonna Radcliff, a military veteran, a Harvard MBA and a BPA employee since 2008, filed suit in early September. Her complaint says she applied for a job as Special Assistant to the Senior VP that was open in early 2013. She didn't get the job, and claims BPA discriminated against her application. She is seeking lost wages, $1 million in compensatory damages and attorneys fees Lori Scott, a contract clerical worker who worked in one of BPA's maintenance garages in Vancouver between 2008 and 2011, is not a veteran. But her suit, filed in late August in U.S. District Court of Western Washington, makes one of the same claims that whistleblowers in BPA's veterans hiring scandals did -- namely that she was retaliated against for bringing internal problems to the agency's attention.

Lori Scott, 51, was employed between 2008 and 2011 by CIBER Inc., a company that provides contract administrative support to Bonneville. She was assigned to a maintenance garage in Vancouver, and received positive performance evaluations in each of the following two years, the last one only four months before she was terminated.

Scott alleges that she began to be harassed after a new foreman was appointed at the garage in late 2010. She claims the harassment continued and escalated in early 2011 after she filed a complaint on BPA's ethics hotline when she learned of improper accounting in the department.

The lawsuit says she filed a second ethics complaint two months later after discovering that the same accounting problems were ongoing, and that that the department was billing BPA for labor costs on work that hadn't been completed.

Two weeks later, Scott's manager at CIBER, the contract firm, was informed that Scott's position was being eliminated as part of a reorganization at the garage complex.

Scott's lawyer, Rob Milesnick, claims the reorganization was a pretext to terminate her, and that her position in the garage was subsequently filled by two successive replacements.

Scott's suit claims she was subject to gender discrimination and a hostile work environment, in violation of state and federal laws. The suit also claims her termination was illegal retaliation for reporting the accounting problems in the garage. She is seeking lost wages, compensatory and punitive damages against BPA and her employer, CIBER.

BPA said it has received the cases, is reviewing them and had no comment.

-- Ted Sickinger ___ (c)2014 The Oregonian (Portland, Ore.) Visit The Oregonian (Portland, Ore.) at www.oregonian.com Distributed by MCT Information Services

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