8,000 Continuous Vetting Alerts Were Not Reported Beforehand by Clearance Holders
The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency is responsible for running the DoD’s Continuous Vetting (CV) Program and during the last National Industrial Security Program Policy Advisory Committee (NISPPAC) reported getting 19,000 alerts so far in Fiscal Year 2021 on 14,000 different contractors with a security clearance. That means there were CV alerts on about six percent of the cleared contractors and of those, 8,000 did not report the issues prior to the alert as required by Security Executive Agent Directive (SEAD) 3. That is forty-eight percent of the cleared industry contractors. Most of the alerts were regarding criminal conduct and financial issues. Without CV these issues would not have been found out until a periodic reinvestigation was done later down the road.
So, what does that mean? It means that these alerts represent information that should have been self-reported. Federal agencies and industry must keep hammering the importance of self-reporting out to their cleared population and encourage all clearance holders to self-report information as early as it is known to avoid having to answer inquiries or letters of interrogatory. DoD CAF reported having 330 Statement of Reason (SOR) reviews pending and have issued over 3,100 draft Statements of Reasons during the period between March of 2020 and March of 2021. Starting later this year the Defense Office of Hearing and Appeals will begin providing the SORs directly to Industry employees and tracking them.
CV/CE…Nice try that didnt last long. I’m guessing those with developed issues that were not self reported “didn’t know they were supposed to report the issues”.
This is why we can’t have nice things
aha! and this is just for contractors, no numbers released for military or government employees
Pretty simple solution….fire them all.
But there are conceivably situations (identity theft, for example) where activity would be flagged, and the clearance holder wouldn’t know about it, unless they checked their credit reports between the ID theft and the CV alert
I’m hit by the statistic that there were more alerts than there were contractors, meaning that the average contractor with an alert had more than one
Continuous vetting is doable for the employment screening— for, let’s say, a bank teller or casino dealer job— but not for national security positions.
The SF-86 security questionnaire is as user friendly and straightforward as furniture assembly instructions from China. If I only had a dollar for every Subject who in the course of an
interview begins providing some flagging issue with, “I didn’t know where to list this information on the E-QIP…” or “I don’t know if this is important but…” Then I have to assure them that it is important information to know that his/her sister-in-law is a green card holder from Beijing even though they were not required to list her under Section 18 and Section 19 does apply to stateside and/or green card holders. Invariably they’re apologetic for having unintentionally omitting this important information and to which I try to assuage their embarrassment by telling them it’s ok, that’s why the clearance process involves an interview.
Continuous vetting is like trusting in a self-driving Tesla. It’s fine on clear sunny days with smooth traffic patterns on open roads with no unusual patterns or obstructions in the roadway. But since the security clearance process is designed to uncover those unusual patterns and problems is it Darwin Award-level idiotic to then use continuous vetting for national security investigations.