Well, ok, looks like the government outsources the granting of security clearances. Thanks for the correction. How fucking stupid can they be to do that? It doesn't make sense for the Obama government to allow such a practice. Security clearances should be granted only by high level government employees. I'm appalled.
Originally Posted by Jewish Lawyer
The outsourcing of security clearances goes back more than a decade, almost two decades . Altegrity owns USIS. Apparently, most security clearances are done by private firms.
http://www.usis.com/Fact-Sheet.aspx
Steven W. Alesio - Chairman
Steven Alesio is a Senior Advisor of Providence Equity Partners, the majority owner of Altegrity, and Chairman of the Board of Altegrity.
http://www.provequity.com/Team/Private%20Equity/title
When was your company established?
USIS was established in July 1996 as a result of the privatization of the investigative branch of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), a federal agency. In conjunction with the privatization, USIS was awarded a five-year contract with OPM to provide security clearance background investigations to more than 95 federal agencies. USIS has 100 federal contracts today.
Why did the government start outsourcing its security-clearance vetting? "The idea was to harness the efficiencies of the private sector to get rid of the backlog of security clearances," Dan Gordon, a former top procurement official in the Obama administration,
tells Bloomberg.
But efficiencies sometimes come at a cost,
says Dion Nissenbaum in The Wall Street Journal, and "one concern for lawmakers is the
pressure on contractors to quickly complete cases to bring in more money for their firms."
The OPM turned to private security screeners in the late 1990s because of growing backlogs that were snarling the government's hiring process. A force of 2,500 OPM investigators and more than 6,700 private contract screeners has sliced into those backlogs, reducing the time it takes on average for background screening by 9 percent in 2010.
As of 2012, more than 4.9 million government workers held security clearances. Senior federal appointments are still carefully investigated by FBI agents, and the FBI and the CIA still maintain strong in-house screening staffs to vet their own sensitive positions.
But privatization efforts started during the Clinton administration keep farming out work to contractors.
The Defense Department turned over its screening work to OPM in 2004 and even intelligence agencies that conduct their own investigations relegate some checks to private companies.
http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2013/J...ground-Checks/