Just whistle ...

As we sift through legal cases as part of our news reporting process, we sure see a lot of feds fail at pressing whistleblower claims and/or obtaining redress for whistleblowing-related retaliation—and it’s not because of a shortage of wrongdoing in the federal government.

Rather, employees seeking eventual redress from the Merit System Protections Board for whistleblower retaliation often find that they do not have protected status because they did not follow protocol—and so have failed to satisfy a long laundry list of statutory requirements.

According to the Merit Systems Protection Board, if a potential whistleblower fails to meet even one of those requirements, then MSPB has no jurisdiction to decide his or her whistleblower retaliation case.

MSPB has just posted a report on its Web site to help educate feds on the process. It says the report—Whistleblower Protections for Federal Employees—is the first from the board “to address in such depth the legal challenges that whistleblowers face.”

Potential whistleblowers might want to take a look.

As for those of you who have already spilled the beans—any war stories you want to share?