Report States Background Investigation and Clearance Timeliness Reporting is Flawed

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) mandates that all federal agencies provide quarterly and annual reports regarding the number of new background investigations submitted and adjudicated, upgrades processed, employees onboarded under reciprocity, and clearances granted. Agencies must also report timeliness data for all categories, including how long it takes from onboarding to final decision. However, there are significant issues with the data being reported. Agencies find that ODNI’s archaic reporting process—an Excel spreadsheet—is disjointed, and the requested data is not easily pulled from a single source, as most agencies still use their own systems to process investigative data. When Continuous Vetting reporting requirements are added, gathering the requested information becomes overwhelming.

A recent Government Accountability Office report identified these same issues. The findings revealed that 39 percent of the data being reported was inaccurate, and 86 percent of the timeliness data was skewed. One would expect the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA), which conducts 95 percent of the federal government’s background investigations, to be able to provide most of the requested data on behalf of agencies. While DCSA does supply some information, extracting the remaining data is extremely arduous and time-consuming for agencies.

With ongoing security clearance reforms, the addition of Continuous Vetting, and the implementation of Trusted Workforce 2.0 requirements, it would be beneficial for DCSA and ODNI to collaborate on providing federal agencies with improved reporting tools. Reporting requirements should focus on the most critical aspects of the background investigation and security clearance process, rather than burdening agencies with unnecessary and overly granular data collection. At times, it appears that more effort is spent gathering data for reporting purposes than actually processing investigations.