DCSA Publishes Hard Deadline for the Transition from e-QIP to eAPP
Over the last year the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA), in collaboration with the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), has been pushing all Federal agencies who are using OPM’s Electronic Questionnaire for Investigations Processing (e-QIP) to start the transition over to the National Background Investigation Services (NBIS) replacement system called eApplication (eAPP). A recently published Federal Investigations Notice (FIN) 23-02 mandates all agencies must obtain NBIS user accounts for their security personnel and transition applicants from e-QIP to NBIS eAPP by October 1, 2023.
DCSA has diligently been working with agency personnel security employees and contractor facility security officers in approving access accounts, training them on using it, and setting up agency templates in the new system. As with any new system, many glitches and hiccups have occurred along the way, causing some agencies to slow-roll their transition. In early days, the system spent as much time being down with having to roll out updates and fixes, as it was for being accessible for use. Naturally, this is frustrating for security personnel, as well as for applicants themselves.
DCSA will issue follow-on notices regarding how to work those e-QIPs in process when the deadline arrives and when e-QIP will no longer be accessible, but most likely, agencies will stop initiating cases in e-QIP long before the deadline to ensure no one gets caught in the middle of the transition and slips through the cracks. For more information on NBIS and how it will affect you as an eAPP applicant, read more here.
Raise your hand if you remember when they distributed the predecessor to eQIP on a floppy disk.
Raise your hand if you remember floppies… five points if you had a computer with no hard drive and you had to boot off a floppy.
OK I’ll stop now.
Lol when I was a kid we had a DOS computer with 5.25 floppy disk, I remember putting in all kinds of codes to get it to do what I wanted. I think I was smarter then than I am now!
Hopefully before DCSA and OPM sunset eQip that eApp and NBIS will be more reliable. Currently, eApp is hard to use because the system is often down or otherwise not working.
Or the days when you filled out paper forms on a typewriter.
Is it possible? Sure. But the transfer of data from one system to the other has to be one of the key criteria for successful transition so hopefully such issues will be rare.
On the other hand, anyone who has gone through the recent TSP site “upgrades” will be skeptical.
Some people have reported that they were informed that an “eyes only” letter was coming which sounded pretty scary, but in the end it turned out to be some very minor issue.
I will remember those days but I will try to forget them if I can.
Sorry, I do not; but I always say that an inquiry like this is a good sign because at least it means somebody is looking at it and you’re no longer stuck in a queue waiting to get assigned.
And… Insert Medical Evaluation here.