Opinion ID: 2770505
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Protected disclosure

Text: We have often noted in retaliation cases that whether the employee plaintiff engaged in a protected activity is a “fact 9 specific inquiry.” See, e.g., Shekoyan v. Sibley Int'l, 409 F.3d 414, 423 (D.C. Cir. 2005) (applying whistleblower provision of the False Claims Act). The fact specific question here is whether Williams‟s disclosure to the Council is the kind of revelation the WPA is meant to protect. The D.C. Court of Appeals has held that a disclosure is protected by the WPA if it reveals “such serious errors by the agency that a conclusion the agency erred is not debatable among reasonable people.” Wilburn v. District of Columbia, 957 A.2d 921, 925 (2008) (quoting White v. Air Force, 391 F.3d 1377, 1382 (Fed. Cir. 2004)). Pursuant to the statutory definition of “protected disclosure,” that agency error can take any of several forms: (A) Gross mismanagement; (B) Gross misuse or waste of public resources or funds; (C) Abuse of authority in connection with the administration of a public program or the execution of a public contract; (D) A violation of a federal, state, or local law, rule, or regulation, or of a term of a contract between the District government and a District government contractor which is not of a merely technical or minimal nature; or (E) A substantial and specific danger to the public health and safety. D.C. Code § 1-615.52(a)(6). The District first argues that Williams‟s disclosure about the failures of ACIS is like disclosures the D.C. Court of Appeals has previously held insufficient to qualify as “the type of gross abuse or violations described in the statute.” Wilburn, 957 A.2d at 926. 10 The D.C. Court of Appeals held in Wilburn that an employee did not make a protected disclosure under § 1- 615.52(a)(6) when the “gist” of her revelation was that a government contractor‟s work was sometimes unsatisfactory and it had “just barely met the contractual requirements.” Id. The court also cited with approval a Federal Circuit decision holding that an employee did not disclose a gross waste of funds by revealing that the Army paid for a scientist to travel abroad for a meeting even though it was not necessary to the Army‟s mission. Id. at 925 (citing Ward v. Merit Sys. Prot. Bd., 981 F.2d 521, 523-28 (Fed. Cir. 1992)). The District also calls our attention to a decision that issued after oral argument in the present case: District of Columbia v. Poindexter, Nos. 12-CV-1477 & 13-CV-82 (D.C. Dec. 11, 2014). In that case, the Court of Appeals overturned a WPA jury verdict, holding that the plaintiff did not reveal gross mismanagement when she disclosed that her supervisor required some employees to record their time but had a more lax policy with others. The court announced that the test for “gross mismanagement” is that the “action or inaction ... creates a substantial risk of significant adverse impact on the agency‟s ability to accomplish its mission” and it viewed the plaintiff‟s disclosure as falling short because there was a “difference of opinion” whether certain employees should record their time. Id., slip op. at 11-13 (citation omitted). In each of these cases, the employee‟s disclosure was minor relative to the scope of the agency‟s work. In the present case, however, there is surely room for debate whether Williams‟s disclosure about the failures of ACIS is significant enough to fall within any of several types of disclosures protected under § 1-615.52(a)(6); therefore, the district court correctly let the jury decide the matter. 11 Implementing ACIS was an important objective for APRA and there could be no difference of opinion that the project was off course. APRA‟s expenditures on ACIS were significant and, in Councilman Catania‟s words, Williams‟s disclosure showed the agency was “just burning money” given that the system could only report gender, sex, and race. This case is not like Wilburn, in which the contractual requirements had been met, if just barely. To the contrary, in discussing the contractor‟s performance, Catania questioned whether the software vendor had violated the False Claims Act and remarked “this smells ... three-and-a-half million dollars for some simple data collection, this shouldn‟t take two years, this should take 20 minutes and it sure shouldn‟t cost three million dollars.” Although the Councilman‟s opinion is not dispositive, he was familiar with the goals of the project and had no apparent reason to overstate the problems Williams disclosed during the Council meeting. Therefore, the jury could reasonably infer from his reaction to the facts Williams disclosed that APRA‟s oversight of the project constituted “gross mismanagement” or a “gross ... waste of public resources.” Even if APRA‟s mismanagement of ACIS was insufficiently serious to qualify Williams‟s statements for protection under the WPA, those statements may reasonably have been viewed by the jury as disclosing an “abuse of authority” or a “violation of ... law” within the ambit of § 1- 615.52(a)(6). At trial, Williams testified that just before she testified to the Council, she saw her answers to the Council‟s questions had been changed, realized her supervisor wanted her to give the incorrect answers, and proceeded instead to give what she knew were the truthful answers. The District argues Williams did not make clear which changes she saw and therefore the jury would “have to 12 speculate to find that Williams even knew that she was disclosing APRA‟s „misstatement.‟” This argument is too little too late. The District had the opportunity on crossexamination to clarify the extent to which Williams realized her answers had been changed, but it did not do so then and therefore left open to the jury the reasonable inference that Williams intentionally exposed APRA‟s effort to mislead the Council. Moreover, we think misleading the Council must be either an “abuse of authority” or a “violation of ... law” within the meaning of the statute defining “protected disclosure” because the express purpose of the WPA is to ensure employees are free to report, among other things, “fraud, abuse of authority,” and “dishonesty.” See D.C. Code § 1- 615.51. Finally, the District argues Williams did not present evidence of her subjective belief that her Council testimony revealed serious misconduct. Although it is true that Williams is protected by the WPA only if she “reasonably believed” she was revealing information demonstrating the serious misconduct described in § 1-615.52(a)(6), see Freeman v. District of Columbia, 60 A.3d 1131, 1141 (D.C. 2012), we find no support in the case law for the proposition that she needed to present separate evidence of her subjective belief. That a reasonable juror “with knowledge of the essential facts known to and readily ascertainable by the employee,” id. at 1151 (citation omitted), could find that the revelations were objectively serious is sufficient to support a jury‟s finding that Williams believed them to be serious when she made them. Only when the disclosing party was unaware of a fact critical to the significance of the information disclosed has the D.C. Court of Appeals held he lacked the requisite subjective belief. That was the situation in Freeman: the employee 13 disclosed conduct he did not know was illegal and therefore, the court held, he was not protected by the WPA. Id. at 1143. We could find no case, however, in which the D.C. Court of Appeals has required the disclosing party to offer evidence that he appreciated the gravity of something that, knowing all the facts he knew, a reasonable person could determine was objectively serious. The District points to Zirkle v. District of Columbia, 830 A.2d 1250 (D.C. 2003), but that case is unhelpful. There the court considered the disclosing party‟s subjective understanding of the gravity of the conduct only because it was not objectively serious; he thought the conduct he disclosed was illegal but it was not. Id. at 1259-60. In sum, before the district court gave the jury the special verdict form with the question “Do you find that Plaintiff‟s testimony before the District of Columbia Council in February 2006 included or constituted a protected disclosure?” it had been presented with sufficient evidence to answer in the affirmative.