GM will face skeptics of its in-house inquiry into the recall crisis, but company officials increasingly believe that CEO Mary Barra will be cleared of wrongdoing in the recall crisis after a three-month investigation by Anton R. Valukas, the New York Times reported today. Valukas’s report is expected to name executives, employees and departments within GM responsible for the delayed recall, and recommend broad corporate and personnel changes at the nation’s largest automaker. The departments under the most scrutiny are engineering, legal, product investigations and regulatory affairs — all of which had knowledge of the switch problems at various times, according to company documents given to regulators. Yet the top officers of the company, particularly Barra, have yet to be directly tied to GM’s failure to recall older-model Chevrolet Cobalts and other defective small cars.
