Components of a Truthful Complaint

Keep in mind that what follows is meant to inform internal investigations spurred by complaints brought by current employees, not external complaints or those brought by former employees represented by counsel.

Marks on a Shoe

Truthful complaints don't contain temporal lacunae; each consequent has a clear antecedent (and many antecedents, a predicable consequent), and their narratives unfold in a logical pattern.

In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Sherlock Holmes observes several small cuts on Dr. Watson's shoe and concludes that Dr. Holmes was recently wet and that his servant is careless. When you receive a complaint, you should be using similar inductive reasoning to ask what led the complainant to come forward. The narrative should identify the cause of the complaint (the antecedent) ' or perhaps a string of causes ' and their corresponding effects, one of which will be that the complainant decided to come forward (the consequent). Like Sherlock Holmes, who induced first that the marks on Watson's shoe were due to someone carelessly scraping mud off them, you should be looking for the most recent antecedent that triggered the complaint and working your way backward through the narrative.

Obviously, investigations focus on whether the first antecedent (the bad conduct) really happened or not. But as a preliminary matter, ask yourself whether the consequents follow logically from the antecedents. A logical gap in a narrative is known as a temporal lacuna, and it is the telltale sign of omission.

Be suspicious of complaints where the alleged bad conduct is temporally distant from the complaint. For example, if someone complains of harassment that allegedly happened a month ago, there is something missing in the narrative: the antecedent that actually triggered the complaint. What's missing may be something as simple as the complainant speaking with her husband, who eventually urged her to come forward ' or it may be evidence of a more sinister motive, like jealousy, greed or revenge.

Also consider evidence of absence, which is different than the absence of evidence. Evidence of absence occurs when a consequent that should be present in a narrative isn't there. Take, for example, an employee facing a write-up for alleged poor performance who complains that the reprimand was actually due to age discrimination. It would be reasonable in this case to expect evidence of similar treatment from the discriminator directed at other older workers. Truthful complaints generally don't contain evidence of the absence of a reasonably expected consequent.

Tangled Webs

Truthful complaints are simple; they generally offer the explanation with the fewest collective antecedents closest in proximity to the consequent.

There are four choices that anyone can make in response to a question: tell the truth, omit details of the truth, evade the truth by implication, or lie. Except for the rare pathological liar, people almost never choose to lie; they lie out of perceived necessity. This is because most of us have been conditioned to believe that lying is bad. Even pathological liars have been conditioned to believe that getting caught lying is bad.

Instead of lying, subjects are much more likely to engage in truthfulness, omission or evasion, in that order. Think of these choices as steps leading into a furnace, with each step leading closer to an outright lie. While some truths can make us embarrassed or uncomfortable, there's generally a cathartic effect to ripping off that Band-Aid and maintaining the moral high ground. For this reason, provided you ask the right questions and listen very carefully to each response, almost every complaint you receive will be (mostly) true.

Concocting fabricated stories is cognitively challenging. In an effort to make an untruth make sense, liars will often attempt to create the appearance of a causal relationship between disparate events. In instances where there are two paths leading to the same consequent (e.g., the complaint), ask yourself which has the more succinct and temporally compelling antecedent. The principle of Occam's razor states that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. It may seem counterintuitive, but in instances where multiple antecedents ostensibly lead collectively to the same consequent, the only antecedent that actually matters is the one closest in temporal proximity to the consequent (sometimes called “the final straw”).

Take, for example, an employee who complains he was demoted for objecting to his supervisor's plan to submit fraudulent expenses. His supervisor outlined five minor performance reasons for the demotion, none of which has a clear causal connection to the consequent. All else being equal, the simpler explanation ' the one with the fewer antecedents ' is that the demotion was in fact retaliatory, not performance-related.

Direct Responses

Truthful complaints contain direct, reasonable, unequivocal language.

The biggest problem that adults have with omitting pertinent details as a deception strategy in investigations is that skilled interviewers won't let them get away with it. When you're interviewing complainants, start with open questions, listening carefully for temporal lacunae, but then whittle the narrative down to its core components using closed questions.

When you ask direct, closed questions you force complainants to either tell you the truth or lie, but first they might take one more step closer to the furnace and engage in evasion, which is a more affirmative commitment to the untruth. This is where listening carefully to the complainant's word choices becomes very important.

Confronted directly, truthful complainants use realistic language to describe what they're alleging, not vague or overly legalistic terms. Recall Bill Clinton's famously evasive statement denying “sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky. Be wary of complainants who, for example, describe a physical “tussle” with a coworker. but fail to use the words that actually describe what happened: “He pushed me into the snack machine.” Also pay special attention to qualifiers. Words or phrases like “really,” “pretty,” “kind of,” and “sort of” are fine when used in the appropriate context, but they can also signal someone's lack of commitment to a statement. For example, the statement, “That is when the harassment started,” is not the same as the statement, “That is sort of when the harassment started.” The former is more likely to be true, and the latter is an evasive statement.

Finally, truthful complainants do not need to give you a hard sell. They won't employ hackneyed phrases like, “I swear to God,” or pepper their accounts with the words “sir” or “honestly.” As a general rule, people who try extra hard to convince you of their honesty are usually lying to you.

Pants on Fire

Truthful complaints exhibit the same dynamic behaviors throughout the interview, irrespective of the specific topic.

When people do decide to step into the furnace, their tension manifests itself in their nonverbal and paralinguistic behaviors, and these traits may be observed by an investigator. Paralinguistic behaviors are non-word vocal traits, such as pitch and tone of voice, silence and laughing. It's important to know that any given behavior taken alone doesn't necessarily mean that someone is lying. The key is to first observe the complainant's responses to innocuous questions and then compare them to his or her responses later to key questions. Investigators call this “calibrating” a subject. The idea is that someone who exhibits traits only in response to particular substantive questions ' but not to other questions ' is likely experiencing more tension in response to the former. This tension could be the sign of a lie.

Truthful complainants are more likely to have a forward-facing, open posture and to move casually throughout the interview. They will use their hands for illustration or emphasis. When relaying an emotional event, the pitch of their voices will rise, and their rate of speech will increase. When asked a simple question that doesn't require speculation or memory recall, they'll do so without significant pause.

Conclusion

After you've asked all of the tough questions, dissected the elements of the complaint, weighed the complainant's word choices and behavior, then you're ready to do your investigation and evaluate the evidence. Sometimes the evidence gathered during the investigation will make what happened very clear. Sometimes, however, what happened is less clear than it was when you got the complaint. In these instances, it's fair to fall back on an assessment of the complainant's credibility.

If the narrative was logical and straightforward, there were no temporal lacunae, the complainants' language was direct and unequivocal, and he or she exhibited no significant behaviors with timing and consistency to any of the key topical questions ' then the odds say you're looking at a truthful complaint. I recommend handling it accordingly before someone like me gives plaintiffs' counsel the thumbs-up to take the case to court on a contingency.

Philip A. Becnel IV is managing partner of Dinolt Becnel & Wells Investigative Group LLC and president of the Private Investigators Association of Virginia.

I'm a private investigator who has a niche: giving my opinion about complainants' veracity to plaintiffs' counsel, who rely on my opinion to decide whether to take cases on a contingent-fee basis. I do this by interviewing complainants in great detail, analyzing their body language and carefully scrutinizing the elements of their claims.

If you've represented companies for any length of time, you've received internal complaints about a variety of workplace wrongdoings, such as harassment, discrimination, and other alleged misdeeds. Your job in part is to limit the company's liability resulting from the bad actions of its employees, and to do this you must investigate each complaint. Your recommendation will be based on the facts uncovered during the investigation. However, documentary evidence is not always helpful, because performance evaluations are subjective and thieves avoid paper trails. In the absence of clear evidence substantiating or refuting the complaint, “the facts” are sometimes a judgment call based on the perceived credibility of the complainant.

If we could take every complaint at face value, there wouldn't be any need for
investigations and lawsuits. But what motivates humans is opaque; complaints can be tainted with emotion, misunderstanding, mental illness and lies. My specialty is differentiating truthful complaints from the ones containing lies. What follows are some of my secrets regarding when I recommend that plaintiff's counsel proceed with a case. Looking for these components of a truthful complaint just might save your company a lawsuit.

Keep in mind that what follows is meant to inform internal investigations spurred by complaints brought by current employees, not external complaints or those brought by former employees represented by counsel.

Marks on a Shoe

Truthful complaints don't contain temporal lacunae; each consequent has a clear antecedent (and many antecedents, a predicable consequent), and their narratives unfold in a logical pattern.

In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Sherlock Holmes observes several small cuts on Dr. Watson's shoe and concludes that Dr. Holmes was recently wet and that his servant is careless. When you receive a complaint, you should be using similar inductive reasoning to ask what led the complainant to come forward. The narrative should identify the cause of the complaint (the antecedent) ' or perhaps a string of causes ' and their corresponding effects, one of which will be that the complainant decided to come forward (the consequent). Like Sherlock Holmes, who induced first that the marks on Watson's shoe were due to someone carelessly scraping mud off them, you should be looking for the most recent antecedent that triggered the complaint and working your way backward through the narrative.

Obviously, investigations focus on whether the first antecedent (the bad conduct) really happened or not. But as a preliminary matter, ask yourself whether the consequents follow logically from the antecedents. A logical gap in a narrative is known as a temporal lacuna, and it is the telltale sign of omission.

Be suspicious of complaints where the alleged bad conduct is temporally distant from the complaint. For example, if someone complains of harassment that allegedly happened a month ago, there is something missing in the narrative: the antecedent that actually triggered the complaint. What's missing may be something as simple as the complainant speaking with her husband, who eventually urged her to come forward ' or it may be evidence of a more sinister motive, like jealousy, greed or revenge.

Also consider evidence of absence, which is different than the absence of evidence. Evidence of absence occurs when a consequent that should be present in a narrative isn't there. Take, for example, an employee facing a write-up for alleged poor performance who complains that the reprimand was actually due to age discrimination. It would be reasonable in this case to expect evidence of similar treatment from the discriminator directed at other older workers. Truthful complaints generally don't contain evidence of the absence of a reasonably expected consequent.

Tangled Webs

Truthful complaints are simple; they generally offer the explanation with the fewest collective antecedents closest in proximity to the consequent.

There are four choices that anyone can make in response to a question: tell the truth, omit details of the truth, evade the truth by implication, or lie. Except for the rare pathological liar, people almost never choose to lie; they lie out of perceived necessity. This is because most of us have been conditioned to believe that lying is bad. Even pathological liars have been conditioned to believe that getting caught lying is bad.

Instead of lying, subjects are much more likely to engage in truthfulness, omission or evasion, in that order. Think of these choices as steps leading into a furnace, with each step leading closer to an outright lie. While some truths can make us embarrassed or uncomfortable, there's generally a cathartic effect to ripping off that Band-Aid and maintaining the moral high ground. For this reason, provided you ask the right questions and listen very carefully to each response, almost every complaint you receive will be (mostly) true.

Concocting fabricated stories is cognitively challenging. In an effort to make an untruth make sense, liars will often attempt to create the appearance of a causal relationship between disparate events. In instances where there are two paths leading to the same consequent (e.g., the complaint), ask yourself which has the more succinct and temporally compelling antecedent. The principle of Occam's razor states that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. It may seem counterintuitive, but in instances where multiple antecedents ostensibly lead collectively to the same consequent, the only antecedent that actually matters is the one closest in temporal proximity to the consequent (sometimes called “the final straw”).

Take, for example, an employee who complains he was demoted for objecting to his supervisor's plan to submit fraudulent expenses. His supervisor outlined five minor performance reasons for the demotion, none of which has a clear causal connection to the consequent. All else being equal, the simpler explanation ' the one with the fewer antecedents ' is that the demotion was in fact retaliatory, not performance-related.

Direct Responses

Truthful complaints contain direct, reasonable, unequivocal language.

The biggest problem that adults have with omitting pertinent details as a deception strategy in investigations is that skilled interviewers won't let them get away with it. When you're interviewing complainants, start with open questions, listening carefully for temporal lacunae, but then whittle the narrative down to its core components using closed questions.

When you ask direct, closed questions you force complainants to either tell you the truth or lie, but first they might take one more step closer to the furnace and engage in evasion, which is a more affirmative commitment to the untruth. This is where listening carefully to the complainant's word choices becomes very important.

Confronted directly, truthful complainants use realistic language to describe what they're alleging, not vague or overly legalistic terms. Recall Bill Clinton's famously evasive statement denying “sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky. Be wary of complainants who, for example, describe a physical “tussle” with a coworker. but fail to use the words that actually describe what happened: “He pushed me into the snack machine.” Also pay special attention to qualifiers. Words or phrases like “really,” “pretty,” “kind of,” and “sort of” are fine when used in the appropriate context, but they can also signal someone's lack of commitment to a statement. For example, the statement, “That is when the harassment started,” is not the same as the statement, “That is sort of when the harassment started.” The former is more likely to be true, and the latter is an evasive statement.

Finally, truthful complainants do not need to give you a hard sell. They won't employ hackneyed phrases like, “I swear to God,” or pepper their accounts with the words “sir” or “honestly.” As a general rule, people who try extra hard to convince you of their honesty are usually lying to you.

Pants on Fire

Truthful complaints exhibit the same dynamic behaviors throughout the interview, irrespective of the specific topic.

When people do decide to step into the furnace, their tension manifests itself in their nonverbal and paralinguistic behaviors, and these traits may be observed by an investigator. Paralinguistic behaviors are non-word vocal traits, such as pitch and tone of voice, silence and laughing. It's important to know that any given behavior taken alone doesn't necessarily mean that someone is lying. The key is to first observe the complainant's responses to innocuous questions and then compare them to his or her responses later to key questions. Investigators call this “calibrating” a subject. The idea is that someone who exhibits traits only in response to particular substantive questions ' but not to other questions ' is likely experiencing more tension in response to the former. This tension could be the sign of a lie.

Truthful complainants are more likely to have a forward-facing, open posture and to move casually throughout the interview. They will use their hands for illustration or emphasis. When relaying an emotional event, the pitch of their voices will rise, and their rate of speech will increase. When asked a simple question that doesn't require speculation or memory recall, they'll do so without significant pause.

Conclusion

After you've asked all of the tough questions, dissected the elements of the complaint, weighed the complainant's word choices and behavior, then you're ready to do your investigation and evaluate the evidence. Sometimes the evidence gathered during the investigation will make what happened very clear. Sometimes, however, what happened is less clear than it was when you got the complaint. In these instances, it's fair to fall back on an assessment of the complainant's credibility.

If the narrative was logical and straightforward, there were no temporal lacunae, the complainants' language was direct and unequivocal, and he or she exhibited no significant behaviors with timing and consistency to any of the key topical questions ' then the odds say you're looking at a truthful complaint. I recommend handling it accordingly before someone like me gives plaintiffs' counsel the thumbs-up to take the case to court on a contingency.

Philip A. Becnel IV is managing partner of Dinolt Becnel & Wells Investigative Group LLC and president of the Private Investigators Association of Virginia.