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City employee tells audit committee city investigations into harassment, retaliation are inconsistent
Summary
At the July 16 Audit and Finance Committee meeting, a city employee urged the committee to act on an auditor report that found inconsistent handling of discrimination, harassment and retaliation complaints, saying investigators failed to interview complainants and witnesses in his case.
Scott Cobb, a City of Austin employee, told the Audit and Finance Committee on July 16 that the auditor's report the committee received months earlier was correct that "the city does not manage all discrimination, harassment, and retaliation complaints effectively or consistently." He said the problems described in the report remain unaddressed and asked to meet with committee members to discuss them further.
Cobb described several investigation shortcomings he said were highlighted in the report: lack of interviews of complainants, lack of interviews of potential witnesses and a lack of closeout meetings. He said those failures affected his personal complaints, including one he filed during the COVID-19 pandemic about workplace rules not being enforced. "I was never interviewed. No witnesses were ever interviewed," Cobb said, adding that investigators ultimately found "no substantiation" in his case because interviews were not conducted.
Cobb also referred to what he said were failures in how investigators handled a separate sexual-harassment related complaint: "In the actual report, they didn't interview either of those two potential victims ... they said, well, we looked at the files of the two people who said they said were it did this, and there have been no complaints in their files about this. Therefore, we did not interview them about this complaint." He called that approach "absurd."
Cobb asked for more training for human resources staff on investigation techniques. "I think there should be definitely a lot more training done by HR about how to conduct investigations," he said.
The committee did not take formal action during Cobb's public comment; the item was heard as part of the scheduled public-communication portion of the meeting. Cobb said he had spoken with staffers Susan Sims and Susanna Cabo and requested follow-up meetings with committee members.
The comments came at the start of a meeting otherwise scheduled for briefings and updates; committee members proceeded to agenda items after Cobb's remarks.
