A D.C. jury has awarded a former city government employee more than $3 million in damages after finding that she was fired after raising concerns about alleged illegal contracting as a whistleblower.
By Meagan Flynn
The D.C. government argued that Hill’s termination had nothing to do with the complaints she raised about those issues and that she was instead fired for poor performance.
But the D.C. Superior Court jury didn’t buy it. Last week, the jury found in favor of Hill, who had argued that she was terminated after making protected disclosures about possible government wrongdoing under D.C.’s whistleblower law.
“Being fired for trying to do the right thing left me shellshocked,” Hill said in a statement to The Washington Post. “Yet still I persisted. I pursued this litigation to ensure that improper contracting practices would be deterred in the District. With this jury verdict, the people have spoken, and I hope that the D.C. Council takes their concern seriously.”
Gabriel Shoglow-Rubenstein, a spokesman for the D.C. Attorney General’s Office, which represented the D.C. government, said Monday that the agency is still weighing its post-trial options.
Hill worked as a supervisory contract specialist at the Office of Contracting and Procurement in 2016 and oversaw contracts at the D.C. Department of Health. Within months of her assignment there, she called a meeting with OCP’s integrity and compliance unit to discuss potential violations of contracting laws or practices, and told her direct supervisor in February 2017.
She alleged multiple instances of contract-splitting involving lucrative Department of Health contracts — an improper practice allowing the contracts to escape scrutiny by the D.C. Council, which only has oversight of contracts that exceed $1 million.
Hill alleged that contracting employees sliced similar types of work awarded to one company into separate, lower-priced contracts that individually didn’t need D.C. Council approval. Together, the contracts totaled well over $1 million and should have been sent to lawmakers for review, Hill told her supervisors. The contract work involved beefing up Department of Health staffing and other IT work.
At least one supervisor appeared to share Hill’s concerns. He wrote in a January 2017 memo to Hill about her key performance indicator milestones that one goal was to “consolidate/eliminate staffing and IT” contracts. Some of them “appear to have been split for some vendors to avoid Council Approval,” the supervisor wrote, according to court documents.
Hill directed her subordinates to prepare the contracts for the D.C. Council to review and approve retroactively. But in March 2017, upper-level officials at OCP told employees not to do it, according to court documents.
Three weeks later, Hill was fired.
Attorneys for the D.C. government argued that the contracts were awarded for different purposes at different times of the year. There was no effort to intentionally split them to circumvent the D.C. Council, they said. They argued that Hill was fired because of poor performance. Her supervisor later testified that she had a “toxic” relationship with her team and wasn’t making them better.
But that same supervisor had in early 2017 indicated satisfaction with Hill’s performance, her attorneys noted in court documents.
Then-OCP Director George Schutter approved Hill’s termination.
In suing the District, Hill said she was not only fired after she continued to insist on going to the D.C. Council, but also lost out on a promotion opportunity. In awarding the $3.4 million judgment, the jury awarded $2.5 million for emotional distress, $934,000 in loss of income and back pay, and an additional $17,000 in compensatory damages.
The D.C. Council has torn into city agencies that circumvent the council and fail to submit contracts for review, sometimes for months or years — a practice that essentially amounts to spending money without legal authority.
Most recently, lawmakers eviscerated D.C. Public Schools last year after officials there awarded 36 contracts over a three-year period totaling about $270 million without council approval and, later, had to submit those contracts for retroactive approval — problems the agency at the time blamed on staffing challenges during the pandemic.
