Senators ask Carter to probe alleged retaliation against former DISA comptroller

Up until 2013, Jimaye Sones was the top financial official at the Defense Information Systems Agency. Today, his sole job appears to be sitting on an obscure Pentagon working group on accounting software, and a pair of senators suspect it’s not because he was a bad comptroller.

On Thursday, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) wrote to Defense Secretary Ash Carter asking him to launch an investigation into possible whistleblower retaliation, saying the senior executive’s reassignments appear to coincide with his investigation and reporting of possible financial irregularities within the organization.

The first was in 2013, when Sones, who had been DISA comptroller since 2005, reported a possible Anti-Deficiency Act violation to agency and Pentagon officials. The senators and Sones’ attorneys say he’d discovered what appeared to a negative $323 million balance in DISA’s 2012 working capital fund.

Shortly thereafter, he was removed from the comptroller job and reassigned as the agency’s inspector general. But in the meantime, the agency’s new financial leadership had tried to fix the accounting problems with what Sones believed were inappropriate methods, so he asked his deputy IG to investigate whether they violated DoD rules. According to his attorneys, Sones was reassigned again almost immediately, this time to an information security post, and eventually, in February, to the Pentagon software study group.

“We urge you to have the appropriate official in your office examine all the facts bearing on Mr. Sones’ recent reassignments and to make a determination as to the appropriateness of his treatment,” Grassley and Warner wrote, noting that his employment history appears to be free of any “adverse reports” that would explain the reassignments.

In 2011, Sones oversaw DISA’s first-ever clean audit opinion, an achievement that relatively few Defense components have accomplished and which the agency trumpeted at the time. However, the DoD inspector general later criticized the methodology the agency’s independent auditors used, saying it wasn’t performed in accordance with accounting standards.

DISA’s public affairs office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the retaliation claim.

Sones also has a case pending before the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates whistleblower retaliation claims against federal employees, his attorneys said.

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