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Merit Appeals Board <br />April 8, 2022 <br />visible for members of the general public, so that this is what this is for. If there is something <br />going on, please report it. This is a safe mechanism now. <br />So, okay, I'm glad that you're doing that—you're looking at it. Both of you, thank you—thank <br />you very much. I don't know if you folks can realize how much this means to me. And it means <br />to a lot of people. A lot of our employees and members of the public. This is a very significant <br />step for the County of Hawaii. And so, with that, thank you very much. <br />I do have a few more questions, if you don't mind. There are two just because I'm a little <br />curious. One was—one question I have there are two different hotline numbers. Why is that? <br />One is for fraud and waste and the other is the Whistleblower hotline. Can you explain the <br />significance of the two separate numbers? <br />MR. BENNER: Well, we found that universallyalmost universally that when we were <br />benchmarking among industry peers that a fraud hotline is one that county auditors host all over <br />the country and some host a whistleblower hotline. <br />Now, ultimately, whether you dial one phone number or the other, it rings to the same phone. <br />But we don't know what the mature program is going to look like. We don't know if it's hosted <br />in our office eventually or if it grows beyond our office. So, we wanted to build it with some <br />smart architecture where we would be able to provide for that carve off, if it became necessary. <br />And we could do that with it being minimally invasive. If we spent all this time, money, and <br />energy to education our workforcea phone number to dial—and then we decided that it grew <br />beyond our capacity or that it needed to be outsources some number of years in the future—we <br />don't want to disconnect the phone number and have them have to start all over again. <br />So, instead we set them up in parallel so that we could, kind of, decide after that period of <br />review, our pilot program, what kind of inputs and that we would need and what this thing is <br />going to look like 5 years/10 years from now. <br />CHR. CABANAS: Okay. Thank you. Is there a plan to budget money for a independent call <br />center? <br />MR. BENNER: I don't know. ThisI would say there's no supplemental on the table right <br />now for that. <br />CHR. CABANAS: Oh, okay. <br />MR. BENNER: And I've had some discussion with Council on it as well. There's a strict <br />tradeoff and we talked about this a little bit, Ms. Mathews the last time I was in front of this <br />panel. <br />That there is a tradeoff between confidential and anonymous—and we are a small community. <br />And one thing we feel like we can do is so long as our office never betrays the confidence of <br />Page 22 <br />