Security Clearance Process

8,000 Continuous Vetting Alerts Were Not Reported Beforehand by Clearance Holders

The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency is responsible for running the DoD’s Continuous Vetting (CV) Program and during the last National Industrial Security Program Policy Advisory Committee (NISPPAC) reported getting 19,000 alerts so far in Fiscal Year 2021 on 14,000 different contractors with a security clearance. That means there were CV alerts on about six percent of the cleared contractors and of those, 8,000 did not report the issues prior to the alert as required by Security Executive Agent Directive (SEAD) 3. That is forty-eight percent of the cleared industry contractors. Most of the alerts were regarding criminal conduct and financial issues. Without CV these issues would not have been found out until a periodic reinvestigation was done later down the road.

So, what does that mean? It means that these alerts represent information that should have been self-reported. Federal agencies and industry must keep hammering the importance of self-reporting out to their cleared population and encourage all clearance holders to self-report information as early as it is known to avoid having to answer inquiries or letters of interrogatory. DoD CAF reported having 330 Statement of Reason (SOR) reviews pending and have issued over 3,100 draft Statements of Reasons during the period between March of 2020 and March of 2021. Starting later this year the Defense Office of Hearing and Appeals will begin providing the SORs directly to Industry employees and tracking them.

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