Whistle-blower exposes mistakes at Navy base
Federal investigators announced Monday they had sent a letter to President Trump and Congress notifying them of “mismanagement” at a unit of Naval Base Ventura County Port Hueneme.
The U.S. Office of Special Counsel’s letter and an accompanying 2017 report by Navy investigators were prompted by complaints from a whistle-blower who previously worked there.
The Navy ultimately determined that more than $32 million worth of equipment could not be accounted for because warehouse employees had failed to keep proper inventory records, Monday’s announcement stated. In addition, some classified materials in the warehouses had been stored improperly.
“A whistle-blower exposed the sloppy handling of millions of dollars’ worth of military equipment, along with the mishandling of classified information,” Special Counsel Henry Kerner said in a statement. “This case resulted in new policies to ensure more accountability, demonstrating the kind of good-government reforms that can result when whistle-blowers see a problem and speak up.”
The Navy’s report notes that problems at the warehouses largely had been improved since 2015, when the whistle-blower started working there. That’s when responsibility for the warehouses was transferred to the Naval Sea Logistics Center, where he had been a supply systems analyst, according to the report by the Office of the Naval Inspector General.
The announcement praised the results of the whistle-blower’s complaints and Navy investigators substantiated three of the four.
Yet the accompanying report shows he was fired in March 2016, roughly around the time the complaints were filed.
The report names the man, John Edwards, noting that he had consented to have his name released.
A response letter from Edwards regarding the report, dated April
2017, shows he ultimately had misgivings about the conclusions.
“One section of the report in particular ... is so inaccurate that it makes me question the validity of the investigation in (its) entirety,” Edwards wrote. The report suggests 500 or fewer inventory errors were corrected during his employment, he wrote, while Edwards states that he corrected between
4,000 to 7,000 errors during the first three months of using the new system.
“That is an egregious misrepresentation of facts,” he wrote.