A second federal lawsuit takes aim at the regulator's own people office, and HR leaders should be watching
A longtime federal HR leader claims the SEC's own human resources office hit her with suspensions, a PIP, and an accommodation denial after she filed EEO complaints.
That, in essence, is the story Dia Gonsalves is telling a federal judge in Washington. Gonsalves, an African American woman who spent 28 years in federal service and roughly a decade as a manager, sued the US Securities and Exchange Commission on May 19, 2026, alleging race and sex discrimination, retaliation, hostile work environment, and denial of a reasonable accommodation under Title VII and the Rehabilitation Act. It is her second lawsuit against the agency; an earlier one, filed in 2024, is still pending before the same court.
Gonsalves joined the SEC's Office of Human Resources in July 2016 as a Branch Chief and held that supervisory role until January 2024, when, she says, the Director of OHR reassigned her to "special projects" on the heels of an unacceptable 2023 rating she disputes. She then began reporting to the Deputy Director of OHR, who also served as the agency's Disability Program Officer overseeing reasonable accommodation requests.
What follows, according to the filing, is a year of escalating workplace squeeze. Gonsalves says she was handed an agency-wide Customer Experience project that a contracting officer's representative warned would take at least seven months and require three...
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