Social Security Administration Continues With Its Tradition of Punishing Whistleblowers

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Recently, Watchdog.org published a report claiming that Ronald Klym, a long-time federal employee is paying a hefty price for blowing the whistle on the waste and abuse taking place in the Social Security Administration.

After blowing the whistle to the media, Klym was put on administrative leave as he was forced out of the Milwaukee building he worked for years.

Klym who had been with the SSA for 16 years, was accused of violating the public trust by discussing issues within the administration with the press. But during the years he has been working for administrative judges who decide Social Security disability benefits cases, he started paying attention to what Daily Caller calls serious management problems within SSA. Among some of the issues raised by Klym, Daily Caller highlights some of the problems with the Milwaukee SSA office regularly transferring claims for disability benefits from its original offices to other SSA addresses around the country in order to make it look like the local administration was reducing the backlog. This move, Klym contends, made Milwaukee’s SSA office appear to be making major progress. While Klym tried to discuss some of these problems with his legislators for years, nothing was done to put an end to the abuse, forcing him to go to the media.

As Klym waits to learn more about his future with the government agency, others who, like Klym, have spent years in SSA’s bureaucratic hell attempting to make waste and abuse within government agencies public share their personal stories of censorship and persecution.

Sarah Carver, a former senior case technician at the Huntington, West Virginia Office of Disability Adjudication and Review, claims she now suffers the consequences of her actions by having to deal with the ostracism and trauma related to how the agency penalized her for reporting on waste and fraud within the system.

Along with whistleblower and colleague Jennifer Griffith, Carver stood up to the SSA’s pressure.

After reporting on corruption problems within the federal agency that later led to the indictment of an administrative law judge, a psychologist, and an attorney over their participation in a scheme to defraud taxpayers of $600 million, Griffith paid the price for speaking out.

During an entire year after attempting to get attention to her reports, Griffith claims to have been placed in “solitary confinement” within her own office. Instead of being allowed to do her job, Griffith was put in “a room that had no windows, and there were no other coworkers.” According to the whistleblower, she wasn’t able to even take part in staff meetings.

What Watchdog.org claims is that the SSA has a history of punishing whistleblowers who see abuse, fraud, and corruption and speak out.

As another governmental agency encourages individuals to step up and alert potential security problems to the authority, government workers who put the concerns of taxpayers first are punished.

As NSA whistleblower famously pointed out: If the whisteblower is a traitor, who are they betraying? Not the American people.