What do you do if your investigation is very delayed? You explain it.
We always have a duty to create a prompt investigation. Here in Texas now, since 2021, we have a duty to do an “immediate” investigation. Point is, it should be done as soon as possible, but sometimes delays happen. I mean, sometimes those delays are bureaucratic, and I don’t take any ownership for that, because I am the investigator and I can only control my own behavior. If a client took six months to call me, I still do my part as quickly as I can, but beyond possibly documenting it, I don’t make it my concern if a client is delayed in placing the call to me. I simply cannot control that.
In my career, my son was born a month earlier than planned. And so I had kind of been gearing up for the possibility that a premature birth might happen. And so the client had been debriefed and the client knew what they needed to know about the findings of my investigation every step of the way. The only thing the client lacked was the written report. And so, after I began to recover and was able to have a little bit of time to write up my investigation, I simply wrote that the big separation between the time that the investigation was complete and the time that the report was authored was related to an unexpectedly early childbirth by the investigator. And that’s all there was to that.
But because I had good notes and I had a good outline from when I had debriefed the client, there was no loss of data during that pause. And so, if there is a big delay related to an investigation, particularly if you as the investigator have caused the delay, you just need a document the delay. Humans will always conduct these investigations and sometimes humans have human delays.
