A Department of Labor board last week ruled against a Hanford contractor’s appeal of a 2016 decision favoring two whistleblowers at the former plutonium production site in Washington state.
Labor’s Administrative Review Board on March 10 upheld federal Administrative Law Judge Christopher Larson’s 2016 ruling that Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) experts Kirtley Clem and Matthew Spencer were unjustly terminated in 2012 after raising concerns about the efficacy of a Hanford medical records computer system they helped set up, according to a copy of the ruling.
CSC hired Clem and Spencer as senior programmer analysts in the summer of 2011. CSC provided information technology services for Hanford’s medical program and subcontracted some of the work to HPM Corp.
In 2011, CSC began creating an electronic records management program called Occupational Health Management (OHM), which organized security clearances and medical records to manage worker assignments. The new program was scheduled to go online on Aug. 20,2012 — a target that was eventually delayed to Sept. 17.
In 2012, CSC’s contract with the Department of Energy expired and HPM won the new prime contract; CSC then became a subcontractor to HPM. That year, Clem and Spencer voiced concerns to their managers about the reliability of the OHM program. Eventually, they were told not to raise their concerns at meetings.
But when the OHM system went online, it registered 213,000 error messages and crashed three times in the first two days, according to Labor’s March 10 ruling.
Clem and Spencer eventually discussed their concerns with DOE and DOE looked into the matter. They also told one of their supervisors about the conversation with the agency; the supervisor told the pair she was unhappy with their “secretive enrollment of co-conspirators to derail the project,” according to the Labor board’s ruling.
Later, CSC suspended Clem and Spencer without pay. The company argued that Clem and Spencer improperly shared proprietary information with HPM and harmed CSC as it renegotiated its subcontract with HPM. Clem and Spencer denied inappropriate sharing of proprietary information.
In a Friday press release from his attorney’s office, Clem said: I am grateful that the Department of Labor found in our favor. After all these years, it feels great to be vindicated. … Retaliation continues to happen all too frequently at Hanford and at the expense of employees simply trying to do the right thing.”
