All California state departments are now required to log every claim of sexual harassment and discrimination into a new centralized system overseen by the California Department of Human Resources.
The $1.5 million tracking system, launched by former Gov. Jerry Brown, went live Jan. 1, according to CalHR spokesman Andrew LaMar.
Brown proposed the tracker in his 2018 budget, following an investigation by The Sacramento Bee that identified $25 million in state government sexual harassment lawsuits over a three-year period and showed that alleged offenders had retained their jobs after repeated complaints.
Until now, the state had no tool to track sexual harassment allegations across the state’s roughly 150 departments. CalHR developed the tool and started training people how to use it in the fall.
The Human Resources Department will be able to see all of the information the departments enter, including names of people under investigation, updates as cases progress and outcomes including settlement payments.
CalHR Director Eraina Ortega said last summer she didn’t yet have specific plans for how to use the findings. Ortega said the data would be the starting point for the process, but she didn’t expect to run all new applicants through the system.
LaMar said the department hasn’t yet reviewed the data for the first three weeks of the system being operational and couldn’t provide a number of complaints, if any, that have been logged so far.
