미연방 내부고발자보호법에 관한 고찰

Abstract

This article discusses the federal statutory protections for federal employees who engage in "whistleblowing" activities, that is, a disclosure made by the employee of illegal or improper government activities in the United States. Thus, the scope of research in this article is limited on the public area-government employees. With the enactment of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, the first statutory protections for federal employee whistleblowers were created. However, it was found that the statutory protections were inadequate. So, the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 was enacted by Congress and it was also amended in 1994 for providing the better methods to protect federal employee whistleblowers. The purpose of WPA is to strengthen and improve protection of federal employee whistleblowers rights, to prevent reprisals against them because of their whistleblowing, and to help eliminate wrongdoing within the government. Specifically, the protections cover most federal executive branch employees and would become applicable where a personnel action was taken because of a protected disclosure made by a covered employee. When federal employees got reprisals against their protected disclosures, there are three remedial forums available for them: remedies by OSC, MSPB, and the negotiated grievance procedures. Like above mentioned WPA in the United States, we also have a similar statute called Anti-Corruption Act that covers all the whistleblowing activities. Although both Anti-Corruption Act and WPA have pros and cons in protecting whistleblowers, this article tries to fill the loopholes in Anti-Corruption Act by analyzing WPA through examining background of legislating WPA, requirements of whistleblowing in WPA, and remedies in WPA. According to this examination, this article suggests recommendations to solve the "Swiss cheese syndrome" that is the primary cause of failure to protect whistleblowers in Anti-Corruption Act. This article also suggests that it is much more desirable to enact the independent and general statute that protects the whistleblowers in Korea.