April 11, 2008

A summary of daily news relevant to the federal workforce produced by the Partnership for Public Service.

1. Federal Diary:  Workers Worry About Health at Interior's Headquarters
2. Public Forum to Address Safety Issues on Vaccines
3. Agencies Use Contradictory Rules for Classifying Information
4. IRS Chief to Tackle Identity Theft

Workers Worry About Health at Interior's Headquarters

The Washington Post
By Stephen Barr

Renovations are never easy, and that's the case at the Main Interior Building.

Almost from the start in 2002, employees in the building have been concerned about dust and fumes, and those concerns continue, according to a survey by the Interior Department's inspector general.

In the survey, 28 percent of respondents from the headquarters building "stated that serious health and safety deficiencies exist in their workplace."

The report said "this high percentage" was probably caused by the modernization project, a multimillion-dollar upgrade of heating, air conditioning, plumbing and wiring in the building that is scheduled to be completed in 2012.

Departmental officials have tried to reassure the 1,700 employees at the C Street NW building that they are monitoring the renovation. Evaluations of health hazards were conducted in 2006 and 2007, and they produced recommendations to improve indoor air quality and address environmental problems.

Shane Wolfe, the department's press secretary, said another inspection has been scheduled for August. He said Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne requested the audit because he is committed to improving health and safety practices across the department.

Barriers have been installed to minimize dust from construction areas, and an industrial hygienist is monitoring air quality in the building, Wolfe said.

The increased attention to construction practices has reduced employee complaints, from an average of three a month in 2006 to fewer than one a month now, he said.

The survey was conducted as part of an audit of Interior's facilities, which include 40,000 buildings, that are spread over 500 million acres nationwide. The survey was conducted from March to May 2007 and included responses from 9,133 employees.

In a letter accompanying an audit report, Earl E. Devaney, the inspector general, said that the department has made progress in addressing health and safety issues but that more needs to be done to protect employees and the public.

For example, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Geological Survey employees in Wyoming worked for almost seven years in two buildings that were condemned and closed to the public in September 2000. Officials are addressing the issue, the report said.

Overall, 77 percent of survey respondents said they work in a safe and healthy environment, and 22 percent said they encounter serious health and safety issues in their workplaces.

Employees cited dirty air filters, inadequate building ventilation and falling brick dust in deteriorating buildings, the report said. Many respondents said they were concerned about mold, radon and asbestos. Others were concerned about being continuously exposed to rodent and insect infestations, the report said.

Others cited maintenance concerns, such as overloaded electrical systems, uneven walking surfaces and filthy restrooms.

Public Forum to Address Safety Issues on Vaccines

The New York Times
By Gardiner Harris

In the midst of yet another controversy about whether vaccines cause autism, the federal government will hold its first ever public meeting on Friday to discuss a governmentwide research agenda to explore the safety of vaccines.

The meeting is intended to help defuse years of criticism from vaccine skeptics that the government is hiding what it knows about vaccine safety or failing to investigate the issue diligently.

But the gathering is unlikely to appease the government’s many critics in part because the latest notion to grip vaccine skeptics — that vaccinations trigger or worsen something called mitochondrial dysfunction, which in turn causes autism — will remain largely unaddressed.

“I think there could be real frustration,” Dr. Bruce Gellin, director of the National Vaccine Program Office, which is coordinating the meeting, said in an interview Thursday.

Indeed, Margaret Dunkle, senior fellow at the Center for Health Services Research and Policy at George Washington University, said government experts needed to take into account the latest controversy.

“If they just talk about the same old issues and don’t reflect what we now know and the concession the government has made, that would be a huge disappointment,” Ms. Dunkle said.

Ms. Dunkle’s niece, Hannah Poling, of Athens, Ga., was 19 months old and developing normally in 2000 when she received five shots against nine infectious diseases. She became sick and later developed autism.

Her parents sued, and late last year government lawyers agreed to compensate the family on the theory that vaccines may have aggravated an underlying mitochondrial disorder. When news of the government settlement became public, vaccine skeptics said the government had finally conceded that vaccines cause autism.

Government officials and researchers said they had conceded no such thing.

“The Poling case has changed the media coverage of mitochondrial disorders but has added nothing to the discussions of what causes or doesn’t cause autism,” Dr. Edwin Trevathan, director of the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in an interview Thursday.

On Friday, many of the main players involved in this debate — including Hannah’s mother and her grandparents, prominent vaccine skeptics and some of the government’s top vaccine researchers — will all be in the same room to discuss research priorities.

The meeting is the result of a 2005 report by the Institute of Medicine, which suggested that the disease control agency might engender more trust among skeptics if it included them in its research planning.

At the time, vaccine skeptics were lobbying to have greater access to the agency’s Vaccine Safety Datalink system, a huge set of health records assembled by large managed care organizations. The agency uses the system to conduct epidemiological studies to measure whether vaccines or their components cause common problems.

Such studies, for instance, have found no link between the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and autism, and they have found no link between a once-common vaccine additive, thimerosal, and autism.

In the face of such studies, vaccine skeptics have increasingly demanded clinical research, not epidemiological studies, to determine whether small groups of children may somehow be more susceptible to vaccine injuries than the general population. Such subsets of children might get lost in large epidemiological studies, they say.

But that kind of clinical research is generally undertaken or underwritten by the National Institutes of Health, not the disease control agency.

The issues raised by the Poling case “can’t go very far tomorrow because it’s really not in C.D.C.’s lane,” Dr. Gellin said.

No decisions are expected to come out of Friday’s meeting; rather, it would allow researchers to hear the public’s priorities.

Agencies Use Contradictory Rules for Classifying Information

The Washington Post
By Walter Pincus

U.S. intelligence agencies have contradictory rules that govern classification of information, including inconsistencies over what would constitute harm if the information were disclosed, according to a report by the director of national intelligence that was made public yesterday.

"Many interpretations exist concerning what constitutes harm or the degree of harm that might result from improper disclosure of the information, often leading to inconsistent or contradictory guidelines from different agencies," said the January report disclosed by Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy.

The study, begun in 2006 to develop a single classification guide for the 16 intelligence agencies, reviewed the books of guidelines used by each agency. It found that there was no common understanding of the meanings of "Confidential," "Secret" and "Top Secret." Those are the three levels of classification set up by Executive Order 12958, which governs classification of national security information and was last modified in 2003.

In fact, the report concluded that "the definitions of 'national security' and what constitutes -'intelligence' -- and thus what must be classified -- are unclear." It also found that there was "no common understanding of classification levels" among the various agency guides, nor any consistent definition as to what constitutes "damage," "serious damage" or "exceptionally grave damage" to national security. Those ratings determine which level of classification should be attached to various information.

The study also found that people classifying information routinely ignored a directive that they should be able to support decisions in writing by describing the damage to national security that would result from public disclosure. Instead, it found, the classifiers routinely just referred to the executive order.

The office of the DNI declined to elaborate on the report. "I'm not going to be able to comment on an internal document that has not been publicly released," spokesman Ross Feinstein said.

The report's recommendations include requirements for "meaningful definitions of classification levels" as well as reasons "for classifying or not classifying information." It also calls for definitions of "damage levels."

This is not the first time the classification system has been declared inconsistent. A 1994 study, commissioned by the defense secretary and director of central intelligence, described the classification system as "cumbersome and confusing" and called for new "consistent and coherent" policies.

Nothing significant was done, however, and, the new report noted, "Not surprisingly, classification/dissemination/disclosure problems continue."

Aftergood, in his blog at http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy, said the report does not address what he described as "the single most necessary change in intelligence classification policy, namely the need to narrow the definition of intelligence sources and methods that require protection."

He said almost anything, including a daily newspaper, can serve as a source or method, "but not every intelligence source or method requires or deserves classification or other protection from disclosure."

IRS Chief to Tackle Identity Theft

Federal Computer Week
By Mary Mosquera

IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman today promised lawmakers that within 90 days the service will develop a comprehensive program to fight identity theft.

IRS will train employees to assist taxpayers who have problems with identity theft by this fall, said Shulman, who has been in the post about three weeks.

IRS has begun to take an enterprise approach to identity theft and a data security issues, including creating the Office of Privacy, Information Protection and Data Security last summer, Shulman said. The service has updated procedures to make sure it treats identity theft victims consistently across the agency. IRS also is implementing an identity theft indicator that tags a taxpayer’s account once identity theft has been established and alert IRS that the account may require special attention.

"Once the new process is fully deployed, taxpayers should only have to provide identity theft documentation once," he said. "This will allow a taxpayer to call the IRS to alert us immediately upon discovering that their identity has been stolen, instead of waiting until the IRS detects it," he said.

For the innocent taxpayer, consequences of identity theft cause the delay or denial of refunds; the assessment of tax debts resulting from income reflected on the fraudulent filer's return; and the requirement for victims to prove their identity to the IRS year after year, said Nina Olson, the IRS National Taxpayer Advocate.

Before January, IRS had no way to systematically identify taxpayers whose identities were stolen. Olson is concerned that IRS does not know how many taxpayers have been affected by identity theft.

IRS also needs to exert stronger oversight, determine policies and criteria that organizations must meet in its electronic filing program.

The IRS primarily focuses on combating identity theft through public outreach, said J. Russell George, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. Actions taken by the IRS in response to employment-related identity theft are not adequate to stop the unlawful use of the identity, he said in a report released April 9 about IRS response to identity theft.

TIGTA recommended that IRS coordinate internally to develop and implement a strategy to fight employment-related and tax fraud identity theft, including coordinating with other agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission and Social Security Administration to evaluate and investigate identity theft allegations related to tax administration.