background check | The Contracting Education Academy

August 11, 2014 By AMK

DHS, OPM suspend contracts with USIS after major cyber attack

The Department of Homeland Security has suspended background checks and most contracts with contractor USIS after a cyber attack may have accessed the personal information of DHS employees.

Peter Boogaard, a DHS spokesman, would not confirm the identity of the contractor but said that a multiagency cyber response team is working to identify the scope of the attack and how many employees were affected.

He said the agency has determined that some DHS personnel have had their personal information compromised and the agency has notified its entire workforce to monitor their financial accounts for suspicious activity.

“As we continue to investigate the nature of this breach on an urgent basis, we will be notifying specific DHS employees whose [personally identifiable information] we can determine was likely compromised.”

Keep reading this article at: http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20140807/IT/308070009/DHS-OPM-suspend-contracts-USIS-after-major-cyber-attack

August 8, 2014 By AMK

DHS contractor suffers major computer breach, officials say

A major U.S. contractor that conducts background checks for the Department of Homeland Security has suffered a computer breach that probably resulted in the theft of employees’ personal information, officials said Wednesday.

The company, USIS, said in a statement that the intrusion “has all the markings of a state-sponsored attack.”

The breach, discovered recently, prompted DHS to suspend all work with USIS as the FBI launches an investigation. It is unclear how many employees were affected, but officials said they believe the breach did not affect employees outside the department. Still, the Office of Personnel Management has also suspended work with the company “out of an abundance of caution,” a senior administration official said.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/dhs-contractor-suffers-major-computer-breach-officials-say/2014/08/06/8ed131b4-1d89-11e4-ae54-0cfe1f974f8a_story.html

February 11, 2014 By AMK

OPM: Contractors will no longer review their own background checks

The federal government will no longer use contractors to review the quality of their own background checks, instead relying on its own employees to do the audits.

Office of Personnel Management Director Katherine Archuleta said in a statement on Thursday that she would make the process ”fully federalized” starting on Feb. 24. “This decision acts as an internal quality control preventing any contractor from performing the final quality review of its own work,” she said.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2014/02/07/opm-contractors-will-no-longer-review-their-own-background-checks/?wpisrc=nl_fed

February 7, 2014 By AMK

The federal outsourcing boom and why it’s failing Americans

Two of the biggest news events of the past year have been the leaks about top-secret snooping by the NSA and the disastrous rollout of Obamacare. But in an important way, they are both manifestations of a story that has been unfolding for decades — that of a federal government that has outsourced too much of what it does to private contractors while allowing the quality of its own workforce to atrophy.

Lots of Americans were disturbed to learn from Edward Snowden that the government is keeping track of their every phone call and text message. But they might have also wondered why a 30-year-old government contractor in Honolulu, with security clearance that was approved by another private contractor, had routine access to some of the government’s most sensitive secrets. Even worse, two years after Pfc. Bradley Manning did the same thing, Snowden managed to download millions of pages of documents from a computer system designed and managed by private contractors without setting off a single alarm. The whole affair was an embarrassment to Washington’s government contracting sector.

So, too, the fiasco with HealthCare.gov, which despite the bleating of Republicans has almost nothing to do with the wisdom of the new health-care law and everything to do with the way the government and its outside contractors set about implementing it. While several of the contractors failed to perform as promised, in hindsight it appears the government also made a crucial mistake in deciding to rely on the IT staff at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to manage the contractors and oversee the final integration of the new system. Free-market ideologues will reflexively see in this failure further evidence of the inherent inferiority of public-sector workers. In truth, it is evidence of how outdated civil service rules and ill-conceived caps on the size and pay of the federal workforce have eroded the government’s ability to perform even essential government tasks.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-federal-outsourcing-boom-and-why-its-failing-americans/2014/01/31/21d03c40-8914-11e3-833c-33098f9e5267_story.html

September 23, 2013 By AMK

Procurement sleight-of-hand gave contractors access to Naval bases

The Navy Installations Command reached outside normal competitive channels to procure a flawed and risky commercial access control system that has allowed 65,000 contractors to routinely access its bases. The procurement process involved purchases on government credit cards 51 cents below the $2,500 maximum allowed, the Defense Department Inspector General said in a report released this week.

The Installations Command used a contract for a Navywide perimeter monitoring system run by the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Panama City, Fla., as the umbrella contract for the Navy commercial access control system, or NCACS, in 49 states and the Mariana Islands. The command also tapped a contract for sensor systems run by the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Port Hueneme, Calif., to buy $9.9 million worth of handheld barcode scanners to check IDs at bases as part of the NCACS project, the IG reported.

The report also made it clear that the Installations Command outsourced base credentialing and background checks to a private contractor in order to save money.

In July 2010, the Installation Command selected the Rapidgate system developed by Eid Passport of Hillsboro, Ore., to vet contractor employees who needed routine base access for up to a year in place of the more secure Defense Department common access card issued to Aaron Alexis, an employee of a Hewlett-Packard Corp. subcontractor who killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard Monday.

The Rapidgate system consists of a registration station that takes a photo of the contractor and scans fingerprints, and a Web interface for submission of personnel information.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.nextgov.com/defense/2013/09/procurement-sleight-hand-gave-contractors-access-naval-bases/70496/?oref=nextgov_today_nl

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