The Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights releases annual...
Length: • 2 mins
Annotated by Eleanor Konik
The Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights releases annual reports.
Every year, these reports have to make a note:
There's one woman who keeps filing literally thousands of sex discrimination complaints that the agency is required to spend man hours investigating.
She started doing this in 2022.
Notice how the 2020 and 2021 reports show a far smaller share of complaints having to do with sex? The number is also much lower.
As I mentioned, there's a requirement to follow up on these complaints: if a person files one, the agency has to look into it.
So, how much does that cost?
Assuming triage only (0.5-2hrs/each), her 2023 complaints cost ~$154k (base) to ~$210k (loaded) at GS-12 Step 5 pay rates.
Now, what if this woman was leading to full-case equivalent handling for each case?
Well, with 16,515 cases and 546 full-time equivalent staff, that's 30.3 resolutions per FTE per year = ~69 staff-hours per resolved case.
That's 385,699 staff hours, or ~$21.2-$28.9m per year.
Single complainants who file merit-free cases have major costs for many federal agencies
This is not the only example, clearly, and there are way more in environmental law, and they're even worse at the state level
The human impacts of these super-outliers are bad for all of us
It's VERY fraught, but I think we need to punish false complaints and at the very least seriously restrict complaint volumes and impacts for those filed on behalf of others.
Sources:
For loaded rates, I tacked on the 36.25% fringe benefit factor in OMB Circular A-76, as noted here: https://t.co/ZisdbPdO1H
Apparently she has done this for even longer, she just had a lull.