Audit cites city failures to address discrimination, harassment

The city has made some progress in handling discrimination, harassment and retaliation complaints by city employees, but some investigations still fail to follow basic rules for conducting such inquiries, according to an audit conducted by the City Auditor’s Office. Members of the City Council Audit & Finance Committee heard about the audit, which followed up on an audit from 2017, during Monday’s committee meeting.

Auditor Mariel Dempster said her team examined 21 final investigation reports completed between January 2019 and June 2024. They found that seven of those inquiries were closed without the interviewer “speaking to one or more potential victims or other people named in the complaint. No explanation was provided for why these people were not interviewed in any of the reports.”

“In the most alarming example we reviewed, a city executive was accused of sexually harassing two subordinates. The complainant provided the names of both alleged victims, the executive, and the executive’s boss, who was allegedly aware of the situation. However, the investigator failed to interview any of the people named in the complaint,” according to the audit. “Instead, the investigator interviewed the department’s HR supervisor to ask if any complaints had been made against the respondent. When the HR supervisor said they did not know of any complaints, the investigator closed the investigation.”

The audit did not name either the parties or the department involved.

Auditors also found that investigators regularly omitted communication with complainants and respondents following the close of an investigation. According to the audit, investigators should be in contact with complainants and respondents once every three weeks and conduct a closeout interview with the parties and the department head at the end of the audit. That did not happen in this case.

This was not an isolated case, according to the audit, with a variety complainants never hearing the outcome of an investigation. In a particularly bizarre twist of public information rules, the auditors found that complainants and respondents who do not receive a final report on their investigation must request it through a public information request.

Susan Sinz, who told the committee she has only been director of the Human Resources Department since May 2024, said her department agreed with the findings of the audit. The audit report itself includes a lengthy response from the department, including a statement that the department intends to eliminate its current case management system. Auditors found that system has a “clunky interface, limited tracking and reporting abilities (and) inability to review peer investigators’ cases.”

HRD Assistant Director Nathan Brown told the committee that his department planned to eliminate the faulty system and replace it with a superior one where any employee can file a complaint online. He said that will happen this fall.

Every city employee is technically required to watch a short video on sexual harassment. However, the audit found that 44 percent of city employees did not have a record of taking the training. Mayor Pro Tem Vanessa Fuentes and Council Member Marc Duchen both had questions about why more employees are not required to watch the video. Auditors concluded that it appears to not be a priority since the city itself does not really track when its employees take the training. Also, auditors found the training video fails to answer a variety of questions.

Auditors found that part-time and temporary employees are not required to have training in sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation.

This is particularly a problem for lifeguards, auditors found, because they are more likely to face sexual harassment than other employees.

At this time, employees may report complaints to the human resources person in their department, to the Human Resources Department itself or to the Auditor’s Office. However, as the audit notes, “Currently, the City of Austin has a decentralized Discrimination, Harassment, Retaliation (DHR) investigative processes and DHR teams are being managed by various City departments. Beginning in Fiscal Year 2026, the DHR functions across City departments will begin to be centralized under the Human Resources Department. Centralizing these functions will allow corporate HRD to develop and facilitate consistent training, implement quality control, and ensure compliance for investigators.”