The chair of the House Oversight Committee and a second Republican on the panel asked senior officials at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on Monday to brief them by Nov. 27 on allegations of sexual misconduct and cultural toxicity at the agency, spotlighted last week in a damning report by The Wall Street Journal.
“On the heels of several bank failures which shook confidence in the banking system … the allegations of a culture of tolerating harassment at the FDIC weakens the credibility of your agency,” Reps. Lisa McClain, R-MI, and Andy Biggs, R-AZ, wrote Monday in a letter to FDIC Chair Martin Gruenberg.
The lawmakers are also asking for the agency to hand over, by Dec. 4, any records of complaints, investigations, reports or allegations of hostile, inappropriate or retaliatory actions since Jan. 1, 2021. Those documents would feed into an investigation the committee is launching regarding workplace culture at the FDIC.
The oversight panel’s probe would hardly be the first to examine the allegations surrounding workplace culture at the FDIC. Three Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee told Gruenberg on Friday they would open a separate probe of the FDIC’s workplace culture. Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee on Friday demanded the FDIC’s Office of the Inspector General conduct its own investigation of the matter.
The oversight panel Republicans on Monday also asked for any documents the FDIC gives BakerHostetler, the law firm the agency retained to conduct, within the next 90 days, a “top-to-bottom” evaluation of the FDIC’s workplace and the allegations.
The lawmakers also want communications seen by the FDIC’s human resources staff and employees of the chairman’s office that pertain to the allegations.
And the lawmakers are requesting a list of any FDIC employees who have been reassigned in connection with the allegations. In their letter, McClain and Biggs cite an anecdote from Wall Street Journal reporting in which the director of the FDIC’s Office of Minority and Women Inclusion was accused of “telling a Black employee that slavery was ‘not all bad,’” and was reassigned to the training division.
Like the House Financial Services Republicans and the Senate Banking Democrats before them, McClain and Biggs raised concerns over testimony from Wednesday, when Gruenberg initially told Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-NC, he had not been investigated for misconduct but later acknowledged he had in 2008, but that the complaint was dropped.
McClain and Biggs also cited a July 2020 FDIC OIG report that concluded the agency “had not established an adequate sexual harassment prevention program and should improve its policies, procedures, and training to facilitate the reporting of sexual harassment allegations and address reported allegations in a prompt and effective manner.”
“Based on [The Wall Street Journal’s] reports, it appears that instead of addressing these issues, the FDIC may have turned a blind eye to sexual harassment and discrimination within its staff,” the lawmakers wrote Monday.
