What do you do when you don’t receive an admission? This is probably the much more likely outcome of an investigation around something like a Title VII or ADEA-type issue. People just don’t think that their own behavior ever rises to the level of being harassment, discrimination, or a hostile work environment. And it causes us to have to evaluate the reasonableness of a reporting party’s concerns and the other people’s perspective. So did the other people think reasonably that our accused did the thing and how did they explain that and how did they describe it? And a lot of that also goes to credibility, which isn’t easy to determine either, but we have to look at motives. People often have a motive not to acknowledge their own wrongdoing, for example. At the very least human nature is to save face and most healthy individuals do not believe they would engage in behavior that could have the consequence of negatively affecting others. And so we have to look at motives, we have to look at other issues of credibility and we have to look at what all of our witnesses say and weigh all of that and then explain our analysis within the writing of the report so that we, as investigators, can prove that it is more likely than not that something did or didn’t happen.
