November 2008
Monthly Archive
Automated Clearance Adjudication
Posted by William Henderson on 14 Nov 2008 | Tagged as: Cleared News, Getting/Updating a Clearance, Investigations, Security Clearance Jobs
In their 17 September 2008 written remarks to the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Intelligence Community Management, John Fitzpatrick, Acting Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Security and Elizabeth McGrath, Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Business Transformation reported that eAdjudication of clean cases for Secret clearances will begin at selected adjudication facilities by the end of the year. About 25% of Secret clearances will be eligible for eAdjudication. This should speed up the process by allowing adjudicators to spend their time on more complex cases.
According to the print edition of the Federal Times, McGrath told the subcommittee in follow-up testimony that the Army will begin a pilot eAdjudication program by the end of December and that it will cover Army personnel, civilian employees and contractors. The administration wants eAdjudication to eventually cover all federal agencies.
Length of OPM Investigations
Posted by William Henderson on 07 Nov 2008 | Tagged as: Chit-Chat, Cleared News, Getting/Updating a Clearance, Investigations, Security Clearance Jobs
In her 17 September 2008 written remarks to the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Intelligence Community Management, Kathy Dillaman, Associate Director Federal Investigative Services Division (FISD), Office of Personnel Management (OPM), provided the following data on investigative elapse times:
|
Closed during: |
All Initial Clearances |
Top Secret Initial |
Secret/Confidential |
|||
|
Total |
80% Avg |
Total |
80% Avg |
Total |
80% Avg |
|
| FY 2007 |
425,268 |
56 days |
54,385 |
83 days |
370,883 |
52 days |
| FY 08 1st Qtr |
158,997 |
60 days |
21,527 |
83 days |
137,470 |
56 days |
| FY 08 2nd Qtr |
167,780 |
63 days |
22,579 |
88 days |
145,201 |
59 days |
| FY 08 3rd Qtr |
190,622 |
54 days |
26,843 |
74 days |
163,779 |
51 days |
After apparently making improvements in investigative turnaround time during FY06 and FY07, OPM’s progress toward the IRTPA December 2009 requirements (90% in 40 days) seems to have stalled.
The numbers don’t paint a true picture of the processing time involve. For example, the average for 100% of Top Secret initial investigations completed in FY07 was 222 days, and the end-to-end processing time (which includes adjudication) for 80% of all initial investigations completed in FY07 was 106 days. It’s often difficult to compare OPM’s data from one report to another, because OPM rarely presents their data same way. For example in May 2008 OPM made a presentation at an ITAA meeting. In this presentation it was stated that “In Fiscal Year 2007, OPM received 586,569 initial security clearance investigations. Of these, 80% of the initial security clearance investigations were completed in an average of 67 days (92 days for Top Secret and 63 days for Secret/Confidential).â€Â So, it’s usually only possible to compare relative changes based on the data within a single report.
