Metro will conduct an independent review of a senior WMATA rail employee following an audit report that called Metro’s Rail Operations Control Center a “toxic workplace” with a culture “antithetical to safety.”

The audit, conducted by the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission (WMSC), found that senior rail operations leadership “regularly directed controllers to ignore procedures and checklists” that concerned safety. In particular, it said that on multiple occasions, Senior Vice President for Rail Services Lisa Woodruff “violated or instructed controllers to violate safety procedures.”

The audit also said that Woodruff told employees not to talk to the auditors and pressured workers to “paint a rosy picture” of the control center during an internal review.

“We take these allegations seriously,” Metro General Manager Paul Wiedefeld wrote in a memo to staff on Thursday. “For this reason, WMATA’s General Counsel has directed an outside law firm to conduct an independent review of the personnel matter.”

Woodruff will serve as a technical advisor to executive vice president Tom Webster in the Strategic Planning and Project Management office during the review. Mike Hass, a former vice president of Rail Infrastructure Maintenance, will take on Woodruff’s role as Acting Senior Vice President of Rail Services.

The audit’s findings went beyond leadership’s inattentiveness to safety, and included observations of racist bullying, sexism, and homophobia. Controllers reported that they had experienced unwanted physical contact at work. And they described an environment where disrepair was tolerated, and where safety concerns were ignored—sometimes for years. Auditors also find that controllers were overworked, and sometimes worked more than 10 or 20 days in a row in violation of Metro policy.

On Tuesday, Wiedefeld told reporters he wanted to take time to understand the context behind the report, and to treat the results of the audit as he would treat “all personnel issues.”

“You look at the details of it and then make a decision,” Wiedefeld said. “So we’ll do the same.”

Metro has 45 days to respond to a list of 21 deficiencies identified in the audit. By that time, the transit agency must propose a “specific and achievable planned action” for each point, identify a person responsible for implementing the changes, and state an estimated date for completion.

In June, Metro announced that it would be replacing the then-director of the control center, Deltrin Harris. Wiedefeld emphasized his desire to foster a strong safety culture in his memo announcing the change. The transit agency is in the process of hiring a new director for rail operations.

Complaints about safety at the rail operations center date back years. Alarms were previously raised after fatal incident in 2009 and 2015, according to the audit report. The WMSC, an independent safety watchdog, was created in 2017 in response to a smoke incident at L’Enfant Plaza that killed one person and sent 84 others to local hospitals.