A quarterly glimpse at San Francisco’s Whistleblower Program shows the Department of Public Health again leading all departments in total complaints investigated.
The report released Tuesday from the City Services Auditor in the Controller’s Office reviewed complaints of alleged wrongdoing against city employees for the first three months of the 2025-26 fiscal year — July, August and September.
The City Services Auditor investigated and closed 105 complaints during the quarter and received 196 new ones. There were 63 open investigations at the end of September.
Three employees resigned during the investigative process.
The Department of Public Health led the count for the overall number of reports in both this past quarter and the previous four quarters, but the Department of Building Inspection and Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing received far more complaints per full-time employee in their departments over the same period.
The Department of Public Health has led the number of whistleblower complaints every fiscal quarter since at least 2019, according to city data.
Health department again tops complaint totals
In the first quarter of this fiscal year, the Department of Public Health reported 43 of the 196 new whistleblower complaints that were received by the City Services Auditor, which was created by voters in 2003 to investigate allegations of city employees engaging in wrongdoing, conduct performance audits of city departments, and make recommendations to city leaders on improvements.
The City Services Auditor uses a formula to measure which departments are drawing more complaints per employee by dividing the number of complaints investigated and closed by the department’s percentage of the city’s workforce.
Using that formula, the Department of Building Inspection had about five and a half times as many complaints investigated, and the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing had about 4.7 times as many.
Those departments had 16 and 12 complaints investigated, respectively.
The Department of Public Health had 84 whistleblower complaints investigated, but has about 7,880 employees. The Department of Building Inspection had 287 employees as of 2024 and the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing had about 256 as of July of this year.
The whistleblower report does not provide identifiable details such as what department the complaints originated from but provides general descriptions of the reports that were investigated.
As part of the investigative and reporting process, complaints are either fully or partially substantiated, or not substantiated, which can still lead to corrective action if deficiencies are found during the investigation.
One complaint that was fully substantiated involved city employees failing to show up to a scheduled meeting with a client, then lying about the reason. A manager then failed to provide an appropriate response to the client.
The resolution in that case was for the employees to be coached on customer service and for the department to develop “new procedures for interacting with discourteous clients,” according to the report.
Misuse of resources among substantiated cases
Another supported the complainant’s report that a manager had required a subordinate to complete personal tasks for them.
An employee was scheduled and paid for unnecessary work, and another employee was found to be using a work vehicle for personal purposes.
Another that was fully substantiated involved a manager making “inappropriate comments” during a meeting. Corrective action was pending as of the issuance of the report.
Corrective action involves a range of fixes from an employee receiving counseling or training, to being suspended or terminated. Departments can receive policy change recommendations or be placed under audits or have their existing policies reinforced.
There was a lower rate of cases resulting in corrective action in the first quarter of this fiscal year than the rate of previous years’ average. The rate has been averaging around 36% since 2016 but was at about 27% for this quarter.
Three city employees resigned during investigations of whistleblower complaints. Those complaints were considered partially substantiated.
Two separate investigations allegedly uncovered evidence of a manager and an employee using city resources for personal purposes. Both resigned during the investigation, according to the City Services Auditor, which did not respond to a request Thursday for more information on the complaints listed in the report.
Another investigation had sufficient evidence to schedule an interview with the employee for using inappropriate language but they resigned before the interview.