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A lawsuit against defense contractor TransDigm is the latest legal quagmire for a company that has elicited rare and bipartisan condemnation for its practices.
A federal lawsuit filed last month accuses defense contracting conglomerate TransDigm of retaliating against a former vice president of finance at a subsidiary firm for calling attention to accounting practices she deemed improper, such as allegedly fiddling with transaction dates to meet quarterly revenue targets. The whistleblower says she was told not to inform anyone else at the company about her findings, and within weeks her job was publicly listed on hiring websites. She was even asked to clean the women’s restroom at the facility where she worked, which she perceived as part of an effort to make her life miserable.
In the complaint, 55-year-old Phyllis Santistevan-Sullivan alleges that an internal performance review conducted after she reported her findings explicitly stated that “her concerns that she raises are all certainly valid.” But the review added that she “comes across aggressive” and needs to work on “employing more tact in her approach to difficult situations.”
To Sullivan, this was “basically trying to make me sound like I’m not a team player,” she told the Prospect in an interview. “Over and over again, when men speak up, it’s allowed, but when women speak up, it’s emotional.”
Other former employees corroborated Sullivan’s...
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