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Paul Igasaki and the Importance of Enforcement

Imagine a crime scene where three people have been shot, two of them fatally. The blood-splattered compact car has been seen on the nightly news, and public officials are assuring the public that everything possible is being done to apprehend the perpetrators of this horrible crime. The police department’s Mobile Crime Unit has scoured the car for evidence, and assured the public that every piece of evidence has been found.

Then imagine the public outrage when a prosecutor, accompanied by two police officers, takes another look at the bullet-riddled car. They find a bullet embedded in a seat and a shell casing in plain view on the car’s floor.

This is exactly what happened after a March 2000 triple shooting here in the District of Columbia, and similar to the public embarrassment on June 6th, when private investigators found one of Chandra Levy’s leg bones after D.C. police had scoured Rock Creek Park for a week to find evidence of the missing intern’s body.

Fast forward to the past two weeks here in Washington —President Bush is assuring us that corporate CEOs and accountants who fudge the books will be penalized. Congress, worried in an election year that the public wants vengeance for lost retirement nest-eggs, passes bills to increase criminal fraud penalties.

Unfortunately, as the analogy to the failed crime scene investigations shows, increasing penalties and tightening standards without also providing adequate budgets, staffing and training for enforcement and prosecution personnel is tantamount to making promises to the public that cannot be kept.

President Bush, himself a former oil executive who participated in corporate transactions comparable to those he is now denouncing and criminalizing, has made his large corporate donors happy by underfunding and understaffing key regulatory agencies. For example, while he has proposed to add $100 million to a badly underfunded Securities and Exchange Administration (SEC), it is not enough. Laura Unger, a Republican who served as acting SEC chairman last year, had requested $10 million more than that for fiscal year 2002. It is also far less than the monies approved by the House and Senate.

According to the non-partisan Government Accounting Office (GAO), the employee turnover rate at the SEC is twice the government average, with salaries estimated at half what accounting and law professionals could make in the private sector, and far less than what they could earn at other federal enforcement agencies such as the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, the filing of corporate securities reports with the SEC has increased 60 percent over the last 10 years, while the GAO reported that the SEC staff grew by only 29 percent.

APAs have a direct role to play in helping another one of our federal enforcement agencies gain the leadership it needs to research and prosecute corporations that flaunt our employment laws. Paul Igasaki has received high marks from corporate leaders, unions, and civil rights groups for his eight years of work as the Vice-Chairman of the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), yet his tenure on the Commission has expired and President Bush has not yet re-appointed him. If we as a community do not send letters to the President asking for Igasaki’s re-appointment, we will lose the last of the high level APAs who were appointed to civil rights enforcement positions during the Clinton Administration (others include Bill Lann Lee at the Justice Department and Yvonne Lee at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights).

According to its website (www.eeoc.gov), the EEOC was established by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and began operating on July 2, 1965. It enforces federal civil rights statutes that prevent discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age or disability. For example, the EEOC enforces the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender in compensation for substantially similar work under similar conditions.

Headquartered in Washington, D.C., and with fifty field offices nationwide, the EEOC coordinates all federal equal employment opportunity regulations, practices and policies. The Commission interprets employment discrimination laws, monitors the federal sector employment discrimination program, provides funding and support to state and local Fair Employment Practices Agencies and sponsors outreach and technical assistance programs.

Vice Chairman Igasaki is widely credited with helping to streamline the EEOC’s procedures so that cases with the greatest impact on employment discrimination get addressed expeditiously. He helped to obtain an additional $37 million for the agency when he was Interim Chair in 1998, and aggressively expanded the agency’s educational outreach programs, so that APAs and other minority communities know that the EEOC is there to help enforce their workplace rights. He encouraged some of our community’s top civil rights attorneys to join the EEOC, such as San Francisco Regional Attorney Bill Tamayo, and pushed strongly for more bilingual staff. These changes have helped APA issues and concerns to stay at the top of the EEOC agenda.

Senator Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), leaders of business and union groups, civil rights leaders, and 37 national and regional APA organizations have written letters to President Bush urging him to re-appoint Paul Igasaki to the EEOC. Not only would his re-appointment send a positive signal about keeping effective APA leaders on the job, but, based on Igasaki’s leadership in addressing sexual harassment at Mitsubishi Motors and other high-profile cases of corporate wrongdoing, his re-appointment would add credibility to President Bush’s assertions that he wants to crack down on corporations that break the law.

To contact President Bush, email him at president@whitehouse.gov or fax a letter to 202-456-2461.

Reach Phil Tajitsu Nash at pnash@campaignadvantage.com.