Senior officials at the Environmental Protection Agency took no action after female employees reported incidents of sexual harassment in the workplace, according to a government watchdog.
The EPA’s inspector general is now launching an audit into whether one of the agency’s regional offices is appropriately handling sexual-harassment complaints more than a year after a congressional hearing exposed a series of disturbing allegations in the office, Mother Jones reported last week.
The agency’s inspector general’s office sent a letter in August to the EPA’s Region 5 office in Chicago notifying managers of the probe. The Region 5 office was at the center of the Flint, Michigan water crisis that forced out its chief officer in January.
Whistleblowers testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in July 2015 that an intern had approached Ronald Harris, the former Region 5 Equal Employment Opportunity officer, in 2011 to file an informal complaint alleging that an environmental scientist at the agency had sexually harassed her.
Harris’ supervisor at the time, Carolyn Bohlen, told lawmakers the employee, Paul Betram, had touched, groped, and kissed the intern. Betram retired from the EPA in 2011.
Harris and Bohlen testified that they faced retaliation from their superiors after reporting the allegations brought by the intern and other women. Harris wrote in a statement that he and Bohlen were subjected to "bullying and intimidation." Both employees were later reassigned within the EPA.
Rep. Elijah Cummings (D., Md.) condemned the EPA during the hearing as having "a culture problem."
The House Oversight Committee demanded "a thorough investigation and finding of facts" following the hearing in a Sept. 1, 2015 letter to the office of the EPA inspector general. Lawmakers sought to determine "whether Region 5 managers appropriately handled allegations of sexual harassment, and whether managers retaliated against employees who raised concerns," according to the letter.
Three months before the July 2015 hearing, agency officials testified before the committee that a high-level employee in the EPA Office of Homeland Security based in D.C. had sexually harassed multiple women.
Patrick Sullivan, an official at the inspector general’s office, said senior EPA officials "did not take any actions" against the man, Peter Jutro, after learning of the allegations.
"EPA senior management did not want to hear about the extent of the harassment" during a staff discussion regarding the allegations, Karen Kellen, the former president of the largest union representing EPA employees, told the committee in July 2015.
The EPA’s inspector general found that Jutro had "engaged in unwelcomed conduct" with more than a dozen women over the span of a decade. The harassment included "touching, hugging, kissing, photographing, and making double entendre comments with sexual connotations," Sullivan told the committee.
Jutro called the testimony a "vast exaggeration" in an email to Mother Jones.
The EPA said it has since implemented mandatory online training for employees outlining anti-harassment policies.
"Harassment of any kind is prohibited at the EPA and will not be tolerated," an EPA spokeswoman told Mother Jones. "Within the last year, the agency issued an order which outlines the procedure for addressing allegations of workplace harassment. It applies agency-wide."