Waiting period for suits by fed workers starts with complaint

By Matthew Chaney
BridgeTower Media Newswires

RICHMOND, VA — The 180-day waiting period for federal employees to file a discrimination lawsuit begins upon filing an initial complaint; not after each subsequent amendment, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled.

In a matter of first impression, the court also unanimously held that the district court erred in considering the waiting period to be a jurisdictional bar. Instead, they said it functions more like a procedural hurdle, and as a result, litigants need not wait until administrative hearings are resolved to file a federal complaint.

Judge James Wynn Jr., writing for the panel, said that this ruling upholds the legislative intent behind the law.

“Allowing agencies to repeatedly delay individuals’ ability to go to court, simply because they have amended their administrative complaints, would frustrate a ‘congressional policy to make the courts the final tribunal for the resolution of controversies over charges of discrimination after all administrative remedies have been exhausted,’” Wynn said.

The opinion is Stewart v. Iancu (VLW 019-2-011).

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema had held that plaintiff Fenyang Stewart failed to exhaust his administrative remedies before filing his workplace discrimination lawsuit against the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office where he worked. As a result, his case was dismissed for lack of subject matter jurisdiction in March 2017.

In his complaint, Stewart said that the USPTO violated the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in failing to accommodate him for his disabilities and in creating a hostile work environment and in discriminating against him.

Wynn said that under federal law, federal employees may file a civil action against their employers for discrimination based on their complaint, as long as they do so 180 days after “the filing of the initial charge,” and as long as there has been no final agency action on the matter.

Wynn said Brinkema was wrong to dismiss the case for lack of subject matter jurisdiction when the USPTO only filed a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim.

The whole point of requiring that plaintiffs exhaust administrative remedies, Wynn wrote, is to protect agency authority in the administrative process and promote efficiency in the resolution of claims. But Wynn said that the point of the 180-day waiting period was to make it less complicated for federal employees to file charges of discrimination.

“We must be wary of ‘overly technical concerns’ laying a ‘tripwire for hapless plaintiffs,’” Wynn wrote. “Permitting the agency to repeatedly confuse litigants in this manner would only further pervert Title VII’s remedial purpose.”

Wynn added that the U.S. Supreme Court has clearly established that time restrictions are only jurisdictional if the statutory text plainly shows that Congress imbued a procedural bar with jurisdictional consequences. But Congress has not tagged the 180-day waiting period as jurisdictional, Wynn said, and therefore it is not.

Kevin Elliker of Richmond represented Stewart on appeal. Elliker said that while the 4th Circuit’s decision to answer the jurisdictional question was surprising, he was pleased with the outcome.

“In the context of this case, it didn’t make a substantive difference in the outcome,” he said, but “it will be helpful to other federal employees down the line if and when they have discrimination claims against their employer.”

Elliker said that while this is the first time that a federal appeals court has ruled on this specific issue, he thinks it unlikely that the Supreme Court would review the case due to the narrowness of the issue in question. But he said the issue of whether timing issues are jurisdictional will likely be taken up by the court in the near future.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Dennis Barghaan Jr. of Alexandria represented the USPTO. Neither he nor press officials for the U.S. Department of Justice responded to requests for comment before press time.