DETROIT - An internal investigation by General Motors has concluded that there was no deliberate cover-up in its decadelong failure to recall millions of small cars with a defective ignition switch, the company's chief executive said Thursday.
Instead, the chief executive, Mary T. Barra, told employees that the lack of action was a result of broad bureaucratic problems and the failure of individual employees in several departments to address a safety problem that the company links to 13 deaths and 47 accidents.
The report, which is being given to federal regulators and Congress on Thursday, does not tie Ms. Barra and other senior executives directly to the recall delay, but will probably result in the firing of a number of employees in G.M.'s legal and engineering departments.
The release of the internal investigative report was expected to be a turning point in a safety crisis that has consumed General Motors since Feb. 14, when the automaker began a broad recall of millions of small cars equipped with defective ignition switches.
The recall grew to cover 2.6 million cars. The automaker has said the number of fatalities and crashes linked to the defect could increase as it gathers more information.
But the recall was just the beginning of an escalating series of safety actions at G.M., including dozens of subsequent recalls of other vehicles.
General Motors has also come under intense scrutiny for how and why it failed to repair a defect that existed in its cars for more than a decade.
Ms. Barra has consistently maintained that she and other senior executives first learned of the switch problems on Jan. 31 - the day that an internal safety committee ordered the initial recall.
'We will hold ourselves accountable,' Ms. Barra told employees in an email on March 4, her first public comments on the issue. Six days later, G.M. hired Anton R. Valukas, chairman of the law firm Jenner & Block, to investigate the long-delayed recall.
Since then, Ms. Barra has suspended two engineers involved in the delay, ordered a reorganization of G.M's vast engineering department and appointed a vice president to oversee all safety matters at the company.
Four senior executives have also left since the recall, and Ms. Barra has vowed to discipline or fire other employees found to be involved in the failure to fix the switch.
But Ms. Barra has steadfastly refused to answer detailed questions about events leading up to the recall - including during her testimony at two contentious congressional hearings in April - until Mr. Valukas completed his report.
Legal experts say that G.M. has taken a calculated risk that Mr. Valukas's findings and recommendations will sufficiently answer the myriad questions hanging over the company.
'The downside is that members of Congress, the press and the public may think that the report lacks credibility if it is in an in-house investigation,' said Carl W. Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.
But Professor Tobias said that Mr. Valukas, a former United States attorney, was a good choice for the delicate task of investigating G.M. 'His reputation is on the line with this report, so he is not likely to sacrifice that for G.M.,' he said.
Jenner & Block has long had ties with the automaker. In addition to performing securities work for the company, one of Jenner & Block's lawyers, Robert S. Osborne, was G.M.'s general counsel from 2006 to 2009, years that the ignition switch problem festered within G.M. And before that, Mr. Osborne was a senior partner at Jenner & Block.
The other firm involved in the internal investigation, King & Spalding, defended G.M. in a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by the family of Brooke Melton, a case that brought the ignition switch defect to light last year.
After G.M. first announced the switch recall, it gave a chronology of events to federal regulators that showed a pattern of failure to address a deadly defect. Eventually, the company admitted that it had been alerted to the defect as far back as 2001, when it was still in development for the Saturn Ion.
Since then, G.M. said, it has conducted several in-house inquiries and studies over the years of a faulty ignition switch installed in Ions, Chevrolet Cobalts, and other small cars.
G.M. received multiple reports over the past decade of vehicles suddenly stalling when the ignition key was bumped by the driver or was weighed down by other objects on the key ring.
Over time, the company learned that air bags could also be deactivated when the cars lost power.
But even though engineers and the company's supplier, Delphi, proposed various upgrades and changes to improve the switch, G.M. did nothing to address the switch problem.
It was only after G.M. engineers were deposed in Ms. Melton's lawsuit in 2013 that the automaker began to take action on the recall.
Ms. Melton died in Georgia after the ignition in her 2005 Cobalt suddenly switched off, she lost control of the vehicle and was hit by another car.
An independent engineer hired by the Melton family discovered that the ignition switch had been significantly improved in later-model Cobalts, but that the new part had the same identification number as the previous, defective part.
The company's chief switch engineer, Raymond DeGiorgio, testified in a deposition that he did not order a change in the switch.
But internal documents later given to federal regulators showed that Mr. DeGiorgio had, in fact, ordered a change in the switch in 2006. No recall was ordered at the time, leaving drivers and passengers vulnerable to death and serious injury in cars equipped with the original switch.
G.M. lawyers unexpectedly offered a confidential settlement in the Melton lawsuit last September. Once the case was settled, the company restarted its internal inquiry into the switch problems.
By late last year, a safety committee had verified that the switch had been upgraded in 2006, but that millions of defective vehicles remained on the road. The committee then ordered the initial recall on Jan. 31.
The investigation by Mr. Valukas hardly concludes the crisis.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has already levied a $35 million penalty against G.M. for failing to report the defect in a timely manner, and has required wide-ranging changes to the automaker's safety practices.
G.M. also faces another round of congressional hearings and a raft of additional investigations, including those by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Beyond the investigations, the company is awaiting recommendations from the lawyer Kenneth R. Feinberg on how it will compensate victims of switch-related crashes and family members of people who died as a result of the defect. G.M. faces hundreds of private claims and lawsuits.
Mr. Feinberg, who oversaw compensation claims for victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Boston Marathon bombing, has said he would make his recommendations to G.M. later this month.
from Google News http://#
via IFTTT
0 Response to "GM Says Inquiry Finds No Cover"
Posting Komentar