The Republican-led U.S. House Financial Services Committee has conducted multiple hearings to investigate alleged discrimination at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, including a session with director Richard Cordray earlier this week.

Now the lawmakers on the committee want the Government Accountability Office to investigate the CFPB’s organizational culture and management practices in light of allegations that bureau managers are discriminating against employees based on race and gender and retaliating against employees who complain.

Rep. Patrick McHenry, a North Carolina Republican who chairs the Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, made the GAO investigation declaration during the subcommittee’s fourth hearing since the beginning of April about allegations of employment discrimination and retaliation at the CFPB.

“Since the subcommittee opened its investigation into allegations of discrimination and retaliation at the CFPB, no fewer than 32 employees have come forward about their maltreatment. These 32 brave leaders have come forward to do what is right: to protect their colleagues who suffer, and they have stood up even in the face of retribution from their managers if they are found out,” McHenry said.

“Shortly, all CFPB employees will have an opportunity to confidentially share all of their concerns with the Government Accountability Office,” he continued.

The GAO investigation was requested a trio of Republicans — McHenry along with Rep. Jeb Hensarling, who oversees the Financial Services Committee, and Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, who is the Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit Subcommittee chairman.

“The problem is a CFPB management culture that condones intimidation, discrimination, and retaliation.  And if the director has failed to reprimand and remove bad managers, then the problem is also his leadership — or lack thereof,” McHenry said.

Latest Response to Allegations

Cordray spent more than two hours on Capitol Hill this week at the House hearing. He acknowledged the growth the CFPB experienced during its first couple of years of regulator existence created some issues with agency employees.

“Because of the speed with which we tried to build this new agency, we have found that we did not get everything right for our own employees. One especially sore spot was the system for reviewing and assessing the performance of CFPB employees,” Cordray said.

“During the second year we had that system, we heard complaints and concerns from employees about it. After we had completed the second year of performance reviews, we began to analyze the numbers in more detail, and we found that many different categories of employees were seeming to be treated unevenly,” he continued.

“Whether the distinction was headquarters versus field, or one part of the bureau versus another, or bargaining unit versus non-bargaining unit employees, or other categories like age and race, we perceived that the review system was creating differential outcomes that indicated the system was unsatisfactory and not working out as intended,” Cordray went on to say.

The CFPB director mentioned that about half of CFPB employee grievances filed to date have centered on performance reviews. Cordray insisted the bureau has since rolled out “decisive and comprehensive” moves to address those matters.

“We self-initiated a more detailed analysis that ultimately showed ratings disparities across a wide range of employee characteristics, which you have seen in the form of the Snapshot report that we released earlier this year,” Cordray said.

“We also put on the table in our union negotiations whether to discard the system, which we agreed to do after bargaining over it,” he continued.

During his opening statement to the House subcommittee, Cordray also touched on what the CPFB plans to implement during the next two fiscal years, including a new, two-level performance review system and a joint working group with the bureau’s union to design a new system to use long-term.

“We also announced that we would adjust prior performance-related compensation for the two years during which our employees may have been adversely affected by the flaws in the prior system,” Cordray said.

“By self-correcting and self-remediating disparities in our performance ratings, we are holding ourselves to the same standards of fairness that we expect from the financial industries we oversee,” he went on to say.