NEW YORK - General Motors CEO Mary Barra will return to Capitol Hill next week for another congressional grilling amid the automaker's delayed ignition-recall scandal.
Barra is scheduled to testify on June 18 before an oversight panel of the House of Representatives, a GM spokesman said Wednesday.
It will be Barra's first appearance before Congress since GM (IW 500/5) released last Thursday an internal investigation report on the car recall that began in February, just weeks after she took the company's top job.
Some employees in the company had detected the ignition-switch problem more than a decade earlier, according to GM. The company knows of 54 accidents in which airbags did not deploy, possibly due to the ignition problem, and 13 deaths since 2004.
The U.S. auto safety regulator, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said it thinks the death toll could be higher.
Barra said the report, prepared for GM by former U.S. attorney Anton Valukas, showed a "deeply troubling" history of "incompetence and neglect" at GM. Barra announced 15 employees were fired.
Barra faced tough questioning before the House panel on April 1. Valukas also will testify at next Wednesday's hearing.
The Valukas report "revealed disturbing truths about GM's systemic and cultural failures that allowed this problem to go undiagnosed for over a decade, but many questions remain unanswered," lawmakers Fred Upton and Tim Murphy, who will oversee the hearing, said in a statement.
"This testimony by Barra and Valukas is a critical step in our ongoing investigation to uncover the facts as we determine what went wrong and what we can do to prevent future tragedies."
GM also faces a federal criminal probe of its conduct in the matter, as well as numerous lawsuits.
Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2014
