Government Agencies Slowly Moving Towards Using NBIS for Background Investigations

The National Background Investigation Services is slowly being pushed out to agencies across the federal government. The initial rollout experienced various glitches that had to be addressed by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA), and many agencies were wary at first of using the system due to frequent outages and other technical issues. It appears that DCSA has fixed most of those issues and it is now more user friendly and reliable. DCSA is also working with non-DoD federal agencies to enroll their cleared population into their Continuous Vetting Program in order to comply with Trusted Workforce 1.5 requirements. That includes enrollment into Rap Back, which provides alerts from the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) when someone is identified as a Rap Back enrollee and they get arrested – which is reported to the FBI.

A few weeks ago, DCSA held a live, virtual NBIS Industry Conference for Industry stakeholders to discuss the transition into NBIS and provide them an opportunity to hear from DCSA and NBIS organizational leadership. This conference was attended by over 1,500 personnel security managers and leaders who were provided information on the current operational status and accomplishments, as well as future changes and capabilities. DCSA has on-boarded 13,000 industry organizations into using NBIS and is working with other government agencies to on-board and start using its services, to include e-APP – the replacement for e-QIP, to process background investigations.