Politics

Report: City Employees Don't Use Whistleblower Hotline

By Alison St John / Reporter

Published July 20, 2009 at 11:49 AM PDT

This story was published more than 14 years ago.

The city of San Diego’s whistleblower hotline to report fraud, waste or abuse received more than 100 calls over the last 9 months. However none of the ones investigated by the city auditor came from employees.

The city’s internal auditor investigated six of the calls. The remaining calls were sent to the relevant city departments for investigation. The audit committee knows that might be why many whistleblower calls came from the public rather than from city employees.

Councilman Carl DeMaio acknowledges the auditor doesn’t have the staff to follow up on every whistleblower call. But he said, “I want city departments to know that the internal auditor will review a sample and look at the documentation, that they cannot sweep things under the rug.”

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One tip the auditor did investigate related to the city needlessly replacing more than 90 water meters at a cost of $30,000. The other pointed out that the wastewater department didn’t have a recycling program for valuable scrap metal.

According to the auditor’s third-quarter report, about half of the 119 calls to the hotline turned out to be unsubstantiated.

The auditor’s department will get one more full-time position next year -- that will be a fraud investigator.

Politics

Alison St John

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.