By Manny Marotta and Gabe Roth
The Judicial Conference’s policies on waste, fraud and abuse (new ones | old ones | comparison), which were updated earlier this month, appear to be a marked improvement over the previous policies, particularly regarding investigator independence and investigation procedures.
But it’s still not a complete response to the 2022 GAO recommendations (scroll to bottom).
While the new policy substantially addresses recommendations 5 and 6, recommendations 1–4, 7 and 8 remain unaddressed or only partially addressed.
Though the judiciary has strengthened the independence of individual investigators, the new regulations don’t fully establish the institutional independence that GAO sought. The new policy requires an investigator to be “outside the chain of command of the subject(s) of the investigation,” but the investigation is still initiated, assigned,…
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