LIBBY QUAID AP food and farm writer | Posted: Friday, January 20, 2006 12:00 am
WASHINGTON - Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said Thursday he doesn't know why senior officials blocked investigations of stockyards and meat companies, but he intends to fix the problems.
A department audit found that employees who are supposed to investigate unfair or anticompetitive behavior were pressured to create the appearance of strong enforcement by logging routine letters as investigations. At the same time, senior officials were stopping complaints from being filed or prosecuted, the agency's inspector general found.
"I don't know if it was a management issue," Johanns said. "Why they chose, for example, to treat a letter as an investigation, I don't understand that. Quite honestly, my whole goal here is to recognize the report and then fix the problems."
The audit released Wednesday didn't give a reason for the lack of enforcement. It did single out deputy administrator JoAnn Waterfield, saying she was holding up 50 investigations as of last August. The report also said she reprimanded staff for not classifying letters asking companies for information as investigations.
Waterfield quit abruptly last month after spending about 14 years at the Agriculture Department, five of them as deputy administrator for the Packers and Stockyards Program. Her resignation letter did not say why she was leaving.
Johanns said he didn't ask Waterfield to resign.
"But she has left, and that gives us the opportunity to declare a new day and fix the problems," Johanns said.
James E. Link, the new administrator of the Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration, said Wednesday that employees have told him they were frustrated with management and felt they couldn't do their jobs.
The Packers and Stockyards Program, part of GIPSA, regulates a $120 billion industry. It has about 150 employees and a budget last year of $19.5 million.
A 1921 law charges the department with investigating unfairness, deception and practices that inhibit competition in livestock, meatpacking and poultry trade.
The audit, requested by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said there have been no anticompetitive complaints filed by the department since 1999.
Officials said there were 104 financial or trade cases referred to department lawyers from 2003 through 2005. There have been three more since Jan. 1, and several more referrals are expected in the next few days, officials said.