Performance Accountability Council Touts 1st Quarter Accomplishments

The Security Clearance, Suitability, and Credentialing Performance Accountability Council (PAC) for the President’s Management Agenda rolled out accomplishments for the 1^st quarter of FY 2020 regarding security clearance and background investigation processing and reduction of the backlog. Below is a summary of the progress for specific milestones:

• The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) reported 91% progress towards maintaining a steady-state goal of 200,000 investigations in process. Significantly, timeliness for processing Secret clearances was reduced from 96 to 77 days and Top Secret clearances was reduced from 254 to 157 days.
• Over 300,000 clearance holders are now enrolled in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) Continuous Evaluation System (CES). This has helped reduce the background investigation inventory by deferring or eliminating the need for reinvestigations and supports the Trusted Workforce 2.0 initiative.

The implementation of a shared background investigations and continuous evaluation records repository is reportedly on track for release by the end of January 2020 and will allow security professionals to view information and determine if reciprocal access requirements are met. When this goes live it should help sort out many of the issues cited on this blog site regarding the length of time it takes to verify investigations or crossover clearances that currently reside in various databases (JPAS, SC, CVS, DOE) owned by multiple agencies. You can read the full PAC report released last month here.