Uncleared Employees Used on Classified DISA Contract

The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Inspector General’s Office, in collaboration with the DOJ, completed an investigation into two federal contracting companies, NetCracker Technology Corp. and Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), and found evidence that from 2008 through 2013, they used employees on a DISA contract without them having the required security clearances.

According to the details released by the DOJ, NetCracker and CSC worked on contracts that implemented software used to help manage the telecommunications network used by the U.S. Department of Defense.  This work was done pursuant to a contract with DISA, under which CSC was the prime contractor and NetCracker was a CSC subcontractor. Although not admitting liability or any wrongdoing, NetCracker agreed to pay 11.4 million dollars and CSC agreed to 1.35 million dollars in reparations. This issue came to light when a former NetCracker employee blew the whistle on the company by filing a lawsuit under the False Claims Act.

As a caveat to this story, other questions I have were not expounded on or explored by the various news stories. No mention was made of the uncleared employees who worked on the contract and whether or not they knew they were required to have security clearances. I would suspect that at least some of them knew, being in that type of DoD environment, and yet they continued to work. What about the contracting officer representative (COR) for DISA? Shouldn’t there have been verification that the employees were cleared before starting the work? Sounds like a lot of things got overlooked that resulted in this goat-rope!