When Exxon Mobil announced unexpectedly bullish targets for pumping oil out of Texas and New Mexico in the spring of 2019, the news sparked confusion for two scientists at the Irving-based company.
That confusion grew into alarm as the scientists began to suspect management planned to pin what they saw as a potentially fraudulent forecast on them.
Damian Burch and Lindsey Gulden would soon complain to Exxon Mobil’s human resources investigators that Burch’s team was pressured to doctor data to make it look like the company was poised to generate billions of dollars more in oil than it was, according to interviews and the findings of a Labor Department investigation.
Burch said he was so unnerved at being directed to gin up a scientific outlook bolstering the company CEO’s misleading public statements that he named the file: “Please—do—not—turn—this—into—a—lie.xlsx.”
Eventually, the company acted on the concerns raised by the scientists, according to the federal investigation: It fired them.
“I had never seen anything like this before,” said Burch, who worked at the company for more than a decade and holds a doctorate in applied mathematics. “Management said to just override the experts so we can get to the number the CEO has already blasted to the public. We could not find any evidence to support it. The science did not support it. The data did not support it. Nothing supported it.”
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Now, federal labor officials at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration have ordered the oil giant to reinstate the two and pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars in back pay and damages in a case that has implications extending beyond the careers of these computational scientists. Exxon officials say they plan to appeal the order before an administrative law judge.
“We reject all claims made by the former employees and will defend the company accordingly,” Exxon spokesman Casey Norton said in an email. “The terminations in late 2020 were unrelated to the ill-founded concerns raised by the employees in 2019.”
“As we have stated throughout, we welcome the opportunity to meet with OSHA to provide additional information or witness interviews, as necessary,” Norton wrote. Company officials said the scientists were not fired for blowing the whistle to federal agencies, but for violating company policies.