Can you just ignore a coelution?

[tom jupille]

I hate to say this, but it's time to look for another job.

[anionman]

I know. The lab is a disaster. They have people in charge who don't know anything. The executive director knows nothing about science and they can't find a qualified exec because the pay is too low. But if I hang on for 5 more years I get a pension. Many people are hanging on to get the pension...

My officemate is running the ICS and just had a high sulfate at 500 ppm. The nitrate spike failed because of what it did to the baseline - 140% recovery. I made the Nitrate a rider peak instead of using the default autodetect parameters and got 95% recovery. Should be proof to everyone that the autodetect default parameters don't work.

[anionman]

My boss just overwrote some data this week. Everyone knows that's wrong. My office-mate had done a run the night before and she was out the next day. My boss overwrote the last calibration check standard. I told my office-mate when she came in the next day and she reported it to the program chief. For an explanation my boss wrote on the data report 'oops.' That says it all....

I have 4 years 9 months and 2 weeks to go before retirement.

[anionman]

Is anyone still reading? I have an update. They conducted and ethics investigation of my boss. She survived because she is still at the lab. I have to meet with the exec next week about it. I must be the evil one.

[tom jupille]

We'll all keep our fingers crossed for you!

[DR]

Ombudsman?

[anionman]

I had the meeting with the exec and Quality Manager. They said they were committed to integrity and thanked me for bringing this to them. They said they want to look 'forward'. They wanted to focus on the integration settings, but I wouldn't let them ignore the coelution situation. I told them that it was totally unacceptable and crazy that my coworker and me were ordered to run the instrument with that coelution and report results. Neither knows chromatography so I told them it was practically the equivalent of dry labbing results. The exec looked nervous. I was ranting. I told myself I would try not to rant but I couldn't help it. I told them that that data was still on the instrument and in the lab files and someday someone might want to look at it. I never said the words 'lab fraud'. I asked if they hired an outside chemist to look at what was going on and they said no. They don't want anyone knowing what an clown show has been going on.

But they still won't listen to me about changing the integration settings from the auto mode that can give bad results. The other day we had a sample with high chloride and a very small nitrite peak about 0.01 ppm. Because of what the baseline did the instrument said it was 0.7 ppm nitrite. They were trying to figure out how to manually integrate it and I showed them how to change the integration parameters so manual integration wasn't needed. The program chief still wouldn't agree. then she said something about if we can hang on for another month something should get done, but she couldn't say more. Stay tuned.

[anionman]

Update. My boss was demoted. I now answer to her boss the radio-chemist who knows nothing about chromatography. There was another failed spike on the instrument last week due to high sulfate. The 3 ppm nitrate spike measured 4 ppm so they qualified the result. The sample had no nitrate. But what if the sample had 3 ppm nitrate? We would be erroneously reporting it as 4 ppm. That's not right.

[anionman]

More good news. We got permission to change the integration settings so we are not reporting inaccurate results. I'm going with valley to valley integration. There is a lot of prejudice against it but it works well.

[Hollow]

*thumbs-up*
thank you for keeping us updated in this story

[anionman]

Thanks for letting me know that people are still reading. More drama is about to occur. The women who got demoted is assigned to run the IC this week and I looked at what she did. She changed the integration settings back to auto. The program chief told us to use the valley to valley settings I had been using because I showed they worked and the auto setting didn't. I haven't looked at the data she generated yet. The chief is on vacation this week. Stay tuned to see what happens on the next episode of As the Lab Turns....

[anionman]

I had to report her for ethics AGAIN. We run reporting limit standards with runs and when her reporting limit standard for fluoride didn't pass she manually shortened the peak and didn't even do it for the other fluoride peaks in the run. Our procedure says to re-calibrate if that happens but she didn't. I showed the chief how to change integration parameters to better handle co-eluted acetate and formate that are annoyingly in our standards. The chief was ok with that but the ex-boss didn't want that, and said that she could do her own work. When I rejected the run she then enhanced the fluoride low calibrator by adding area and including another peak - the formate peak. She didn't even note the manual integration on that report. I said that's textbook lab fraud and e-mailed the QA manager. Now all of our runs are not allowed to finish until some decision is made by the bosses - who don't know anything about chromatography.

[anionman]

More news. the 3 runs that my ex-boss did in violation of the procedure all had to have Cl and F rerun. It took 3 days to find the subsamples and run them.

I also got a nasty written reprimand from the chief accusing me of talking in the cubicle area about the improper manual integrations. Discussion of fraud and data integrity must be kept confidential. It concluded that if I speak to any coworker in a way that can be described as disrespectful, slanderous or unprofessional again, I could could be fired.

I then had a meeting with the chief about it and I was irate. I yelled that SHE'S A CROOK. She ordered me to commit lab fraud and threatened to get me fired for getting that order countermanded.

What I didn't actually say was that the chief is also guilty. She let the instrument be run improperly for a week after I sent her an e-mail saying it was unethical. There is a week of compromised data on the instrument that also got sent out mostly by mail. Mail fraud. And when I reported it to the QA manager and director they didn't tell the customers and have everything resampled and rerun. I really think that would be the proper thing to do. The instrument was being run in a manner that violated both our procedures and method 300.0. Now they want me to keep my mouth shut. My first instinct was to report higher up the chain to the head of HR. I have talked to some coworkers and one in particular wants me to report everything and get all the bosses fired. I really don;t know what the best thing to do is. If anyone is reading tell me what you think.

[James_Ball]

What these bosses don't understand is that a disgruntled employee, if let go, can report the matter to the FBI and soon there will be agents knocking on their doors. That is when things become very real, very fast. It happened at a lab I worked at just before I started working there, and I heard about it for years after. Of course in that case the story was made up by the disgruntled employee just saying they "thought" something fishy was going on and it kept the lab under investigation and in court for over a year. After a very close look at all the data through several audits every thing was given the green light and the case was dropped, but believe me there were some nervous lab workers and bosses during that time.

A quick search online can bring up actual cases of lab fraud and what the penalty was in the end, and that information will frighten anyone into double checking and triple checking their results. If you have that information and present it to upper HR and say "Hey, I don't want this to ever happen here so I am being proactive about it" they might take it seriously.

[anionman]

I have been looking up cases of lab fraud but the media reports don't say how they were caught. This was in the news in 2019:

As alleged in the indictment, Ecklund was a laboratory analyst who was responsible for testing
environmental samples for the presence of hazardous substances. On numerous occasions between
December 15, 2014 and February 25, 2015, Ecklund allegedly took steps to make it appear that deficient
samples met quality control standards when, as charged in the indictment, they did not.

Four years later he gets busted. Last March it got reported that he was ordered to pay a $2,500 fine and serve two years of probation after he pleaded guilty in 2020 to nine counts of wire fraud, according to a U.S. Department of Justice press release.

Not a terrible penalty legally besides a ruined career. I bet he paid tens of thousands on lawyers too.

One of the guys from Perkin Elmer told us about a disgruntled worker who falsely reported fraud at a lab but the lab shut down anyway. It would be really awful having federal agents probing the lab. I can imagine an owner of a smaller lab might just walk away. My lab isn't small. And it was minor fraud because I stopped it after only a week. But my ex-boss might keep trying to do it if she continues in chromatography.

There is hope that they will move her out. They have hired a conflict resolution expert and the chief says if that doesn't work the anion team could be broken up. My ex-boss got kicked out of radio-chemistry years ago after conflict resolution between her and the woman in charge of radio-chemistry didn't work. This guy won't know anything about chromatography so how is he going to settle anything? And the main conflict is between me and my bosses who won't take this woman out of chromatography for some reason