background investigation | The Contracting Education Academy

October 9, 2019 By cs

Background investigations move to their new home at the Pentagon

The Department of Defense formally became the lead agency for conducting background investigations for current and potential feds and contractors Oct. 1, fulfilling congressional and administration requirements that the Pentagon take charge of such investigations at the start of the 2020 fiscal year.

According to a Department of Defense official who spoke on background to reporters Oct. 1, the transfer consisted of approximately 2,900 federal employees from the Office of Personnel Management’s National Background Investigation Bureau to the DoD’s new Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, which encompasses both background investigation duties and industrial and technological security.

“We’ve created what is arguably the single largest security-focused agency in the federal government,” the official said.

Employees of the background investigation agency moved from being Title 5 employees at OPM to Title 10 employees at DoD, a position that is effectively the same, according to the official, and only a handful of employees chose to take discontinued service retirement rather than move to DoD.

“Merging the components into one organization will allow us to execute our two core missions: personnel vetting and critical technology protection, underpinned by counterintelligence and training,’’ said Charles Phalen Jr., acting director of DCSA, in the news release on the merger.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.federaltimes.com/management/2019/10/01/background-investigations-move-to-their-new-home-at-the-pentagon

September 16, 2019 By cs

The future of continuous evaluation is just about here, and it has a different name

What started as pilot program for the Defense Department and other agencies in the intelligence community will soon become the key piece to the Trump administration’s overhaul of the suitability, credentialing and security clearance process.

The overhaul itself is called the Trusted Workforce 2.0 initiative, and it’s the administration’s attempt to, at last, modernize a security clearance and vetting system that’s badly in need of an update.

The initiative itself will come in the form of several new policies and procedures, which are due sometime near the end of the year, defense and intelligence officials have said. Everything from the type of security clearances themselves to the standards used to investigate and adjudicate clearance holders will change.

And the continuous evaluation concept, the program DoD and others have used to monitor its cleared population and maintain trust with its employees and contractors, will also evolve.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/workforce/2019/09/the-future-of-continuous-evaluation-is-just-about-here-and-it-has-a-different-name/

July 17, 2019 By AMK

Pentagon aims to expedite security clearance process with $75 million award

Perspecta Enterprise Solutions LLC won a $75 million other transaction agreement on May 14 to continue modernization of the federal security clearance process, in particular with machine learning and related technology.

The Defense Security Service and Defense Information Systems Agency awarded the 24-month OTA, which covers improvements to National Background Investigation Services information technology.

Perspecta will help DSS — which will eventually be renamed the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency — expedite background investigations, adjudications, continuous vetting and insider-threat programs by creating a Security Enterprise Architecture and Data Services prototype.

When a new employee or transfer needs clearance, the prototype will use machine learning and natural language processing to pull from disparate data sources to fill out form information. Previously a full investigative package was prepared manually and handed over for adjudication.

Keep reading article at: https://www.fedscoop.com/security-clearances-perspecta-enterprise-solutions-ota/

July 11, 2019 By AMK

DISA, DSS award second OTA to build governmentwide security clearance system

Defense officials said Tuesday that they had awarded a $75 million other transaction agreement to build major components of the IT system that will eventually handle all background investigations and security clearance adjudications for federal employees and contractors.

The award went to a team of vendors led by Perspecta, the same large government contractor that won a separate $49 million OTA last year to build another portion of the National Background Investigation System (NBIS).

The new agreement is specifically meant to build the security architecture and data services for NBIS. Officials decided it was needed after lessons learned from the first OTA, which focused primarily on building investigation management tools.

“We’ve had pieces of the NBIS application running at other DoD agency data centers and being built by other partners, independent of this common enterprise architecture,” said Terry Carpenter, the program executive officer for NBIS. “What we’re figuring out is by building out a common data broker, we can get an even greater efficiency. This is a federal-wide service that has to be up 365 days a year, 24 by seven. And to assure that type of robustness, we really wanted to make sure we were taking advantage of the cloud architecture to make sure that the application has those kinds of properties: Self-healing, self-aware, can expand with the demand. And all of those pieces are in this new OTA.”

Keep reading article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/nbib-transfer-to-dod/2019/05/disa-dss-award-second-ota-to-build-governmentwide-security-clearance-system/

May 22, 2019 By AMK

Trump shifts all security clearance work to Pentagon

After months of speculation and a standing September deadline, President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday officially moving the federal government’s background and security clearance investigations to the Defense Department and giving the receiving office a new name.

After the 2015 breach of Office of Personnel Management systems that compromised sensitive personal information of more than 21 million current and prospective federal employees and contractors, the Obama administration created a new background investigation office called the National Background Investigation Bureau. But the administration also charged the Defense Department with supporting NBIB by building and managing the underlying IT systems, which would be called the National Background Investigation Service.

Congress later passed language in the 2018 defense authorization bill giving the Defense Department responsibility for meeting its own clearance needs, which make up about 70 percent of all investigations work. The remaining 30 percent of civilian agency clearances would remain with NBIB and OPM.

Rather than split that work up, the Trump administration made moves to migrate all clearance work to the Defense Department under the Defense Security Service. As the early days of planning began, officials took the opportunity to rethink the process, which hadn’t had an overhaul in more than 50 years.

Keep reading article at: https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2019/04/its-official-trump-shifts-all-security-clearance-work-pentagon/156534/

What started as pilot program for the Defense Department and other agencies in the intelligence community will soon become the key piece to the Trump administration’s overhaul of the suitability, credentialing and security clearance process.

Perspecta Enterprise Solutions LLC won a $75 million other transaction agreement on May 14 to continue modernization of the federal security clearance process, in particular with machine learning and related technology.

Defense officials said Tuesday that they had awarded a $75 million other transaction agreement to build major components of the IT system that will eventually handle all background investigations and security clearance adjudications for federal employees and contractors.

After months of speculation and a standing September deadline, President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday officially moving the federal government’s background and security clearance investigations to the Defense Department and giving the receiving office a new name.

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