Six investigators for the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) have falsified security checks, with more charges expected to follow. Three were federal employees and three were contractors.
As with many crimes, the lingering question is "why?"
The answer is blatantly obvious to Evan Lesser, Director of ClearanceJobs.com: quotas.
Lesser tells FederalNewsRadio, "when you have very strict quotas and heavy deadlines to meet, this is unfortunately something that comes about. In this case, the situation is unfortunate especially because one issue, one problem, one mistake can actually have some serious national security issues."
According to the Examiner, "law enforcement officers said that the investigators lied about interviews they never conducted because they were overworking, cutting corners, trying to impress their bosses, or in the case of a private contractor, trying to earn more money by hurrying through the checks."
While OPM has made progress in reducing the number of pending investigations, Lesser says that doesn't mean the workload is any lighter.
There are so many investigations that need to be done and when you look at the workloads of the contract investigators as well as the OPM investigators, I think they're still short-staffed at this point. And talking to some of the investigators we have close contact with, mostly on the contract side, I think that they'll tell you as well that their case workloads have not gotten any smaller over the past few years.
In general, there have been two main ways to attack a workload problem: more manpower or more technology. Lesser says both would help, but "there really isn't any digital or computer substitute for that real person-to-person interaction. Throwing technology at it? Not necessarily the solution. Hiring more people is probably the best way to go at this point."
In addition to hiring more people, Lesser says OPM is on the right track with efforts to streamline the process.
I think that's been the best thing OPM has done over the past few years is really look at it from the end-to-end process and they've made excellent headway on reducing the time to obtain clearance. So there's still a lot of work to be done, but considering where we were just three, four, five years ago, I think we're definitely in a much better place now. You know, the good thing that will come out of all of this is it will shed a little bit more light on these quotas that the investigators have to maintain and perhaps that will allow some funding to be released for additional workload people to help them out.
When asked if the additional personnel should be contractors or federal employees, Lessen says it doesn't matter. "Wherever these people are that have these investigative skills really are the ones that need to be put to work. If it happens to be on the contractor side, (and) they can get them on the job faster, then so be it."
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FederalNewsRadio - Security clearances falsified
Examiner - U.S. Security checks falsified by investigators
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