Philip Materra, Dirt Diggers Digest - Normally, my colleagues and I are happy to include a new multi-million-dollar penalty paid by a Fortune 100 company to the Justice Department in our Violation Tracker updates. This month, however, we are reluctantly creating an entry for a $17 million settlement reached with IBM.
...Turning decades of public policy on its head, this administration has decided that those efforts to rectify discrimination are themselves discriminatory and should be the main focus of DOJ’s civil rights enforcement.
What makes the IBM case especially pernicious is that DOJ brought it under the guise of a False Claims Act action. The FCA is normally used against contractors found to have been cheating the federal government. It is most commonly applied against healthcare providers and suppliers to the Pentagon.
IBM was accused of violating its responsibilities as a federal contractor by taking race, color, national origin, or sex into account when making employment decisions....
In a press release announcing the settlement, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward proclaimed: “Merit drives promotion and opportunity. Not someone’s sex or race.” He continued: “Today’s settlement proves this Department’s commitment to ensure companies are not using taxpayer funded work to further woke unconstitutional practices in American workplaces.”
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