NBIS System Updates Continue to Cause Unexpected Errors

When the Defense Counterintelligence Agency (DCSA) first introduced their new National Background Investigation Services (NBIS) system a few years ago, it was still going through a lot of changes to work out the bugs that caused almost daily system outages. This caused a lot of frustration with eAPP applicants and the security professionals that used the system to process background investigations. DCSA slowly worked through those issues and the system outages decreased incrementally to where they had one or two outages a month for a few hours.

As they move toward using it for more than just processing eAPPs and making it a one-stop shop for all background investigations and security clearances, the probability of additional system crashes and outages increase. For example, just this week DCSA implemented a new multi-factor authentication process of logging into eAPP which involved transitioning to DCSA’s Information Systems Agency Identity, Credential, and Access Management authentication system. Can you guess what happened? You got it! System access errors galore across a wide swath of the user population. Despite users following DCSA’s Authentication Fact Sheet, users were unable to access eAPP and were told to contact DCSA’s OCIO IT Helpdesk.

A recent report published by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) also noted dissatisfaction among agencies regarding the challenges with Trusted Workforce 2.0, DISS and NBIS, along with the DCSA and Director or National Intelligence memorandums directing agencies to comply with a multitude of metrics reporting requirements. Little do they realize that the legacy systems currently being used by various agencies are not built to pull the data being requested, and would need to be overhauled or new systems to be built entirely. One thing we can all expect related to this process…change.