Montgomery County Maryland Inspector General Megan Davey Limarzi issued a report on Wednesday asserting the Montgomery County Office of Human Rights “was not effectively tracking inquiries and exceeded its established time frame for completing the investigations and issuing determinations.”
The inquiries involved the processing and investigation of discrimination and worker protection complaints, which the Office of Inspector General (OIG) learned about through allegations received on its hotline in December of 2023.
The Human Rights office, headed by Director James Stowe, also “still has not drafted policies and procedures to govern the full extent of their responsibilities or implemented mandatory training requirements or continuing education for staff, as recommended in our 2020 report,” states the OIG’s report.
According to its web page, the Human Rights office is charged with fostering “equal opportunity for all.” It was created “to help avoid and conciliate intergroup friction and to enforce human rights laws.”
The office has 11 employees, five of whom are investigators. It has a $1.9 million budget.
While the office started an intake log in May of 2023, there is no guidance on how that is filled out, according to the OIG report. Many of the fields that the OIG would normally expect to be filed out were often blank, according to the report.
Of 13 complaints that resulted in issuances of a Letter of Determination OIG looked into, nine exceeded an established time frame of 440 days to process, investigate and act on. Three of those nine complaints took more than 800 days or nearly 3 years to complete, according to the OIG.
In June of 2020, the OIG also investigated the Human Rights office. Some of the recommendations from that report have yet to be implemented, according to the June 7 OIG report.
