ROCHESTER — A former Mayo Clinic artificial intelligence compliance leader is suing the health system for alleged retaliation and discrimination in her late 2025 dismissal.
Attorneys for Traci Tamiko Eto filed the federal lawsuit in Minnesota U.S. District Court on Monday, July 6.
The complaint alleges that Mayo Clinic violated the Family and Medical Leave Act and Americans with Disabilities Act when it terminated Eto’s employment while she was on FMLA leave. The lawsuit also alleges that Mayo Clinic retaliated against Eto, as she “would uncover a disturbing set of flaws in Mayo’s AI compass” during her employment.
The Post Bulletin has reached out to Mayo Clinic for comment. The health system has not yet responded to the complaint in court.
When Eto joined Mayo Clinic in December 2023 as the health system’s director of research operations, she brought with her 18 years of experience “regarding the protection of human subjects of scientific research,” the lawsuit says, with her most recent work focused on healthcare AI.
“She was designated as the leader of Mayo’s efforts to align with the Biden Administration’s October 2023 Executive Order establishing security and privacy-based safeguards for the burgeoning AI sector,” the lawsuit says.
In the late spring or early summer of 2024, Eto raised concerns over the Mayo Clinic Platform’s de-identification processes. Mayo Clinic Platform is a healthcare AI data, development and testing hub that utilizes de-identified patient data from Mayo Clinic and other healthcare institutions.
“Eto detected signs that certain de-identification processes within MCP, specifically those related to data-sharing with global providers, had not been properly reviewed by Mayo’s IRB process,” the lawsuit says, referring to the Institutional Review Board, a committee that ensures research performed with human subjects is done so ethically.
Eto reported this concern to her supervisor, Jeffrey Schmoll, administrator of Research Shared Services, and Scott Wright, the senior chair and medical director of the IRB and Human Research Protection Program. The lawsuit alleges that Wright was “resistant to Eto’s alarms” and that he said having the IRB revisit the Mayo Clinic Platform process “would jeopardize the pace of ongoing research projects, which in turn would compromise Mayo’s competitive advantage.”
The lawsuit states that Eto witnessed several other instances of “ruptures in Mayo’s compliance culture.” In November 2024, Eto spoke up about a research study on MAYA, a digital assistant tool. She alleged that the study team mischaracterized its findings and used software without receiving the regulatory authorization needed to do so.
“The MAYA project was deeply flawed to the point of corruption and Eto was by no means the only dissenting voice: 10 separate whistleblower reports sounded similar alarms that study investigators were attempting to disguise a 67% error rate,” the lawsuit alleges.
However, Schmoll and Wright allowed the study to proceed without IRB oversight, the lawsuit alleges.
“When Eto pressed Schmoll for an explanation, his excuse was that resolution of the issue would cost ‘political capital’ that he was not prepared to spend — an evasion of responsibility that stunned Eto,” the complaint reads.
In February 2025, Eto reported two instances of misconduct — one of which was the MAYA study — to Mayo Clinic’s legal department. Following that report, “she immediately began to be excluded from executive level meetings of the human research operations leadership team,” the lawsuit alleges, “and her principal subordinate, Michelle Daiss, was inserted into the meetings in her place.”
Eto received a pay raise on March 12, 2025. About two weeks later, Schmoll allegedly confronted Eto, telling her to either resign from her current role and find a different job within the institution or, if she did not resign, “she was facing the prospect of consequences in her ‘personnel file’ that would render her unemployable at Mayo and would impede her career outside the institution.”
In April 2025, Schmoll gave Eto a corrective action plan, which Eto challenged with Mayo Clinic’s human resources department. The HR team found that the plan did not violate Mayo Clinic’s policies, but “there is no indication that the HR team conducted any meaningful investigation,” the complaint alleges.
In July 2025, Eto was demoted, no longer supervising her 39 subordinates, the lawsuit claims. She experienced “a significant depressive episode immediately after her de facto demotion” and applied for leave under FMLA. Mayo Clinic initially rejected the FMLA leave request, but after Eto hired an attorney, the health system approved roughly three months of leave, the lawsuit states.
“On September 2, 2025, roughly halfway through her leave, Eto was notified that her position was being eliminated as part of a supposed reduction in force,” the lawsuit states. “In fact, her job was the sole one eliminated.”
Despite applying for 15 internal positions, Eto received only one interview, the complaint says. Mayo Clinic officially terminated Eto’s employment on Dec. 1, 2025.
As Eto has searched for jobs elsewhere, the lawsuit alleges that Mayo Clinic uses a “ghost file” system in external verification systems that “blacklists employees who have raised compliance concerns by flagging them as ‘Not Eligible for Rehire.'”
While it does not list a dollar amount, Eto’s lawsuit requests a jury trial. She is requesting the following relief: back pay, front pay and lost benefits, damages under the ADA and False Claims Act, litigation costs and other monetary relief, as decided by the court.
“The Mayo Clinic made the deliberate choice to put profit first, over patient privacy, and in one egregious instance, patient safety,” Arthur Davis, an attorney with HKM Employment Attorneys, the firm representing Eto, said in a statement. “By sounding the alarm when Mayo’s AI mission lost its way, Traci Tamiko Eto valiantly made herself, her career and her reputation a target. She is standing up to corporate immorality and arrogance.”
Read the lawsuit document: