Background Check | The Contracting Education Academy

December 20, 2018 By AMK

Pentagon to take over all security clearances in 9 months, officials say

The Defense Department and Office of Personnel Management expect to have merged two offices and moved 2,000 federal employees and a 600,000-case backlog of security clearance investigations nine months from now.

The new office will be established under the Defense Security Service by Oct. 1, 2019, Director for Defense Intelligence Garry Reid told the House Armed Services Committee during a hearing last week on the security clearance backlog. The office will absorb the National Background Investigations Bureau, established in the wake of the 2015 OPM network breach.

Originally, NBIB was created to handle the majority of background investigations while the Defense Department built out secure infrastructure to maintain those operations, called the National Background Investigations Services system. As the backlog grew—hitting a peak of 725,000 this April—Congress ordered NBIB to transfer Defense investigations to DSS. Rather than split the work between two departments, the administration plans to move all clearance work to the Defense Department.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2018/12/pentagon-take-over-all-security-clearances-nine-months-officials-say/153509

July 20, 2018 By AMK

Defense Security Service is trying to overhaul the entire security clearance process

The Defense Security Service is preparing to take over all background investigations for civilian and defense agencies and doesn’t want to inherit stale and potentially broken processes, officials told Nextgov.

The Defense Department office is currently reviewing white papers obtained through an other transaction authority solicitation seeking innovative methods for conducting background checks of current and potential federal employees who need security clearances.

The project is not about the technology behind background investigations process but rather how to innovate the process itself—from when the SF-86 form is filled out to when the clearance decision is made by the agency—according to Tara Petersen, head of DSS Office of Acquisitions, and her deputy, Stephen Heath.

“We’re really looking broader at the process itself,” Petersen said. “We’re looking to prototype a process.”

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2018/07/defense-security-service-trying-overhaul-entire-security-clearance-process/149606/

February 29, 2016 By AMK

OPM seeks to tighten security of contractors conducting background checks

Contractors that conduct background investigations for the federal government will have to report information security incidents to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) within half an hour, are required to use smartcards as a second layer of security when logging on to agency networks, and must agree to let OPM inspect their systems at any time.

Those are new requirements OPM has written into draft contracting documents released last month that govern how the personal, often sensitive, information gleaned during background investigations should be stored on contractors’ computer systems.

The draft request for proposals is “intended to provide industry advanced notice of the pending solicitation as well as an opportunity to provide comments, feedback and recommendations that the government can consider prior to finalizing the solicitation,” OPM spokesman Sam Schumach told Nextgov in an email.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2016/02/contracting-docs-opm-tighten-it-security-background-investigation-companies/125741

May 5, 2015 By AMK

Contractors had access to personal data without required training, background checks

Federal contractors without background checks, non-disclosure agreements or required privacy training were able to access sensitive data from Army childcare subsidy payment applications that they were hired to process, the General Service Administration’s inspector general said in an April 27 report.

The IG said it published the report because GSA recently said it had agreed in principle to get more Army funding to hire up to 50 more contractors.

“While our evaluation is in progress, we are issuing this management alert report due to the serious nature of these findings and the risks associated with permitting new contractors to work with sensitive information, including PII [personally identifiable information], without having completed initial background investigations, completed required training, and having executed non-disclosure agreements,” the report said.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/story/gsa-ig-contractors-had-access-personal-data-without-required-training-backg/2015-04-28

January 29, 2015 By AMK

Audit: HHS failure to screen Obamacare contract recipients cost taxpayers $400M

Not even good enough for government work.

An internal investigation into how the federal government awarded contracts for developing and building the Affordable Care Act’s most important public element — the online exchanges that were to be used by millions of Americans to purchase health insurance — has found the process was fraught with obvious and expensive errors.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) failed to conduct background checks on prior work by companies awarded many of the Obamacare contracts and failed to require those same companies to be accountable for cost overruns, leaving taxpayers on the hook instead.

The report published Jan. 22, 2015 by the Office of the Inspector General for HHS concludes those mistakes soaked taxpayers for more than $400 million in unexpected costs — essentially doubling the expected cost of building the exchanges in the first place.

Keep reading this article at: http://watchdog.org/194839/obamacare-contracts-cost-taxpayers/

The Defense Department and Office of Personnel Management expect to have merged two offices and moved 2,000 federal employees and a 600,000-case backlog of security clearance investigations nine months from now.

The Defense Security Service is preparing to take over all background investigations for civilian and defense agencies and doesn’t want to inherit stale and potentially broken processes, officials told Nextgov.

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