When whistle-blowers are silenced

By the time Mark Erickson took a deep breath and blew the whistle on the University of Washington medical school, he had already spent six years alerting his bosses there to rampant billing fraud.

They didn't listen. In fact, they repeatedly told him to stop talking about it — including, he says, asking him to shred documents. At times he feared for his job. Eventually he became the lead informant in an FBI investigation. Had anyone inside UW listened to his warnings, there's no doubt the school could have avoided a record $35 million federal fine in 2004.

I'm recalling Erickson's story now because he is typical of many whistle-blowers I have known. They are just honest workers troubled by waste or abuse. And they almost always report it all internally first, without showboating to the press.

It's exactly this type of behavior the U.S. Supreme Court just decided ought to be punished.

Last week the court ruled the First Amendment doesn't protect public employees who point out waste or fraud as part of their jobs.

The 5-to-4 ruling leaves government workers — about 21 million at the local, state and federal levels — more prone to retaliation from bosses when they blow the whistle, even if their allegations turn out to be true.

I don't know what effect this will have around here, but I suspect it won't be good.

We do have state laws designed to protect whistle-blowers, and those are still in effect.

But a February 2006 audit of a program in our state government designed to encourage whistle-blowing found that retaliation by bosses remains "the most serious threat to the program's effectiveness."

A number of state workers who had reported waste or abuse told auditors they were retaliated against, and that nothing was done about it.

In all, some 200 state government workers took the risk to blow the whistle last year. Many called out only minor offenses, such as a co-worker using a computer for private play on government time.

But others saved us real money. When a prison worker pointed out double billings by contractors in the state prison system, the state recovered nearly $90,000 for taxpayers.

This seems like an extremely dubious time in our history to make it even harder for government employees to speak the truth. Whistle-blowers are the only reason we know anything at all about torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, about the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program or about secret prisons in Europe.

Erickson, who is now a private medical-billing consultant, says government whistle-blowers already were among the least protected and this ruling undermines them further.

"It just seems like there's a crackdown on government workers right now, with the goal being to suppress them, not to get at the underlying problems they're bringing forward," he said.

The muzzling reached absurd levels in Seattle last week. It was revealed that the longtime Seattle-based spokesman for the federal agency in charge of Northwest wild salmon has been barred from talking to the public about anything related to the fish.

His offense? He acknowledged the blindingly obvious — that dams on the Klamath River in Oregon and California might be harmful to salmon. For that slip-up of common sense, he's been silenced. And we in the press now are supposed to get information about endangered stocks of Northwest salmon from political hacks back in Washington, D.C.

I realize this is a media spokesman, which is hardly the same as a whistle-blower. But it shows the extreme lengths government is going to to control information when you can no longer tell the difference.

Danny Westneat's column appears Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.