By Dan Portnov If you’re a federal employee or individual under investigation by an Office of Inspector General, waiting for an update or some sign of progress from the OIG can be agonizing. As we’ve written before,[1] OIG policies and procedures are often opaque, and...
By Dan Portnov (photo from USAToday.com) In perhaps the biggest news story of a slow August, Jeffrey Epstein apparently hung himself in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Manhattan early Saturday morning.[1] Epstein’s suicide launched multiple...
By Dan Portnov Office of Inspector General investigations don’t always make the news. After all, no one ends up in jail or paying back billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains as a result (usually). However, one federal agency’s OIG seems to garner an outsized amount...
By Dan Portnov Occasionally we work on cases or investigations that involve highly wonky subject matter – stuff that only lawyers or legislators would know and care about. One of those recent matters touched on the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act,...
By Dan Portnov As readers of Grand Jury Target know, we have a healthy respect for the various Offices of Inspector General (see here, here and here). OIG investigations can lead to serious consequences and, to add further anxiety, much of how the OIGs conduct their...
By Dan Portnov We have written on several occasions[1] about OIG investigations on this blog, chiefly because a) their opacity creates a certain mystique, and b) we hope to minimize the chances that their targets underestimate the seriousness of what could later...
By Dan Portnov Last week, Sara wrote about Liff v. Office of Inspector General for the U.S. Dep’t of Labor, et al., a government contractor’s unsuccessful suit against the Department of Labor and its Office of Inspector General (OIG) for the latter’s publication of a...
By: Sara Kropf Office of Inspector General—or OIG—investigations can have wide reaching consequences. I’ve written before about the lack of procedural fairness surrounding these investigations. Now, you might think that OIG investigations affect only federal agency...
By: Sara Kropf On first glance, investigations by a federal agency's Office of Inspector General, or OIG, may seem like no big deal. An inspector general has no criminal authority. He can’t charge you with a crime or throw you in jail. He can’t even arrest you. Maybe...
By: Sara Kropf You may think of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s (FDIC) as the friendly folks who insure your money at the bank. Or you may think of the FDIC as the regulator that deals with failed banks. You probably do not think of the FDIC as an agency...