The harassment began with a texted photo of her male coworker’s penis. Then came questions about her sexual orientation and interest in a threesome, as well as a request for a photo of her breasts.
She feared for her safety. But not until this April — three years after she filed an internal complaint — did the Oregon Health Authority complete its investigation. A year earlier the man she’d complained about had left the agency.
Public records obtained by The Lund Report show that Oregon’s largest state agency of 5,000 employees for years has failed to consistently and timely investigate workers’ complaints of workplace discrimination and harassment. The complaint allegations included racial slurs, being denied telework while receiving cancer treatment and doctoring pornographic pictures to show coworkers’ faces and posting them to Facebook, among others.
The slow pace of investigations has not only created stress and uncertainty for employees, it has exposed the agency to potential lawsuits. The delays have persisted despite triggering union grievances going back at least to 2019, records show.
State guidelines call for agency workplace investigations to be completed within 120 days — a longtime state standard that is also contained in labor contracts.
But that benchmark has routinely been missed — and not just the case that took more than three years. That’s the picture painted by several spreadsheets used by the agency to track investigations. The data is incomplete, officials say, and many timeline entries in the spreadsheet are missing. But since 2021, what’s depicted in the records indicates that:
- At least 15 investigations took more than a year to complete.
- Two of those took longer than two years to complete, and three other cases still under investigation date back to 2022.
- Of the health authority’s 26 active investigations, 12 have remained open longer than the 120-day benchmark, records show, and an additional three cases have been open for more than twice that.
“The vast majority of cases I’ve seen, it looks like those situations could be investigated and even have a conclusion within sometimes days or weeks."
For an employer to take a year or longer to investigate complaints is “never going to be a reasonable amount of time,” Sharia Mayfield, an employment attorney who teaches at Willamette University College of Law, told The Lund Report.
“The vast majority of cases I’ve seen, it looks like those situations could be investigated and even have a conclusion within sometimes days or weeks,” she said.
Delays, she contends, reflect “a lack of willpower on the part of the employer or care or concern.” In contrast, corrections department administrators are required to respond to prisoner grievances within 35 days, she added.
It’s important for employers to quickly address workplace complaints because they might reveal illegal or dangerous activity, Mayfield added. Taking too long could also open up an employer to being sued for responding inadequately.
The goal of the state’s 120-day timeline is for cases to be concluded swiftly before witnesses leave for other jobs, forget details or are influenced or intimidated by managers or coworkers.
A grievance filed in May of 2023 by Local 503 of the Service Employees International Union cited delays by the equity division that consistently and “constantly” violated those contractual timelines.
“This is something my team is very worried about and frustrated with,” Madison Newell, an SEIU contract enforcement coordinator, told The Lund Report regarding the agency’s history of delays.
She said that the union and the health authority resolved the grievance in September 2023, with the agency agreeing to better track investigations.
There have been improvements since then, but some employees have seen continued delays.
Long delay “really wears” on employees accused of misconduct, as well as those trying to address discrimination they are facing at work, Newell said.
Issue surfaced in March
The delays in completing the investigations surfaced internally at Oregon Health Authority in March, records show, and Director Sejal Hathi and other top leaders began asking about the scope of the problem. Eventually, Hathi cited the delays in a memo explaining her termination of Leann Johnson, the at-will director of the Equity and Inclusion Division.
“It’s critical that OHA investigates and resolves civil rights complaints in a timely manner,” health authority spokesperson Larry Bingham told The Lund Report in an email.
The agency has doubled the size of the Equity and Inclusion division since 2017, while increasing the number of investigators from three to seven.
Johnson, who led the authority’s Equity and Inclusion Division for nearly a decade, previously told The Lund Report that the backlog was “an agency problem” caused by understaffing that she had raised with leadership.
Since her firing in June, Johnson has hired Portland attorney Talia Yasmeen Guerriero, who declined to comment on the new data showing investigation delays.
“At this time, she will not be making any statements on this topic other than to state that she does not believe it was raised to her as a personal disciplinary issue prior to her sudden termination,” Guerriero wrote in an email to The Lund Report.
Two-track system
The Oregon Health Authority divvies up workplace complaints between human resources and its equity divisions, which is responsible for combating internal and external inequities. Cases that involve discrimination because of an employee’s race, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion or other members of protected classes are assigned to the equity division.
Occasionally the same situation could be investigated by human resources as well.
The cases described in state spreadsheet include complaints alleging discrimination, derogatory remarks, sexual harassment, yelling, threats and demeaning and dismissive comments to female staff.
One case centered on allegations of a staff member making comments about how “to ‘please’ women and ‘being choked out’” and referred to another employee as a “whore.”
Others included allegations that an employee’s “eyes tend to wander during conversations.” And another complaint alleged that an employee made derogatory statements about an “old white guy.” Instances of delay included:
- 491 days to substantiate a seemingly easy to prove allegation that an employee sent nude photos of himself to coworkers — separate from the case involving a naked photo that took three years to investigate.
- 222 days to substantiate a complaint that an employee used the n-word in conversation with a supervisor.
- 461 days to partially substantiate allegations that employees were told they could not speak Spanish at work and faced differential treatment.
“This is something my team is very worried about and frustrated with,."
‘Groomed by a sexual predator’
In March, Billy Martin, an HR manager, flagged the issue to Hathi saying that an employee had been unable to get a response from the Equity and Inclusion Division team on the status of their case. Citing other delays, he wrote, “As you can imagine, this lack of closure and response has opened the Agency to a great deal of risk from a legal perspective.”
A day earlier the employee had hand-delivered a packet to HR regarding the complaint they had filed with Equity and Inclusion Division in February 2021.
In April 2024, the division completed its report on the complaint, which was obtained by The Lund Report with a follow-up records request.
The woman complained to a manager in late January 2021 that she had been having “issues” with one of her coworkers for months. She told the manager that she feared “retaliation” and did not want to go to HR because her coworker had friends working there.
She transferred to another job in the hospital but in January told another employee that she continued to receive “unwanted attention” from her coworker, “to the point where [Complainant] no longer felt safe on the unit,” according to the report.
HR forwarded the allegations to the Equity and Inclusion Division in February 2021.
The coworker texted a picture of his penis to the woman in December 2020, according to the report. He’d also told her she “looked cute with eye lashes, hair, and makeup,” asked for a photo of her breasts and also asked about her sexual orientation, a threesome and when she’d last had sex.
In her account, the woman wrote that she felt like she “was being groomed by a sexual predator” and wanted off the unit, but was “unsure what to tell managers.” Additionally, the complainant wrote that her coworker’s behavior seemed to reflect the “culture on [the] unit.” She worried that filing an HR complaint would make her life “a living hell” because her coworker had “too many friends.”
She wrote that she worried she “may be harmed” by her coworker and that another employee advised her not to be alone with her alleged harasser.
When it was finally completed, the investigation concluded that the complaint was valid and most of its allegations true.
Addressing the backlog
Since June, spokespeople say, the agency has made it a priority to address the backlog, and go through open cases to resolve them as quickly as possible.
Agency leadership has added an investigator and intake specialist to the equity unit while directing division managers to standardize the complaint process to ensure investigations are monitored and completed in a timely way.
The unit is also working on better coordination with the HR unit, an improved case monitoring system and a desk manual to formalize the process.
With the added staff, Communications Director Robb Cowie wrote in an email,“ the Equity and Inclusion Division has addressed nearly all matters that were opened prior to 2024. Of the nearly 300 investigations initiated since January 1, 2020 (but before January 1, 2024), only 9 remain open and active … Pending any extenuating circumstances – such as parties on leave or other factors – civil rights investigations are being completed within 120 days.”
I reported a doctor for serious misconduct and provided plenty of evidence, filed three separate complaints- all three shut down without investigation. The OHA pressures patient's to file anonymously and The Medical Board is worse. No wonder Oregon is in the bottom of the bottom, in terms of (mental) healthcare. I had to change my lifestyle to avoid involuntary brushes with a doctor, who has a side gig as a stalker: I do not believe these agencies are working for us, any longer.