Dead Among Those Interviewed in Faulty Background Checks
By Chris Strohm & Nick Taborek - Jul 8, 2013 1:01 PM ET
Anthony J. Domico, a former contractor hired to check the backgrounds of U.S. government workers, filed a 2006 report with the results of an investigation.
There was just one snag: A person he claimed to have interviewed had been dead for more than a decade.
Domico, who had worked for contractors CACI International Inc. (CACI) and Systems Application & Technologies Inc., found himself the subject of a federal probe.
Domico is among 20 investigators who have pleaded guilty or have been convicted of falsifying such reports since 2006.
Half of them worked for companies such as Altegrity Inc., which performed a background check on national-security contractor Edward Snowden. The cases may represent a fraction of the fabrications in a government vetting process with little oversight, according to lawmakers and U.S. watchdog officials.
“The process for granting security clearances across the federal government is broken,” Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the top Republican on a Senate panel overseeing government contracting, said in an e-mail.
Passing a government background check is a requirement before an employee or contractor can be granted a security clearance to access classified information. The process has been under increasing scrutiny since Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who had worked for McLean, Virginia-based Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp. (BAH), leaked secret documents on U.S. surveillance programs.
Snowden’s Vetting
Snowden held a top-secret clearance, and his background check was done by the USIS unit of Falls Church, Virginia-based Altegrity in 2011, according to Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat.
USIS, the government’s No. 1 provider of such work with $253 million in awards this year,
is under investigation by an inspector general who has said there may have been shortcomings in the company’s vetting of Snowden.
Among the 10 background-check workers employed by contractors who have been convicted or pleaded guilty to falsifying records since 2006, eight of them had worked for USIS, according to the inspector general for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. The personnel agency is responsible for about 90 percent of the government’s background checks.
In one case, Kayla M. Smith, a former investigative specialist for USIS, submitted some 1,600 falsified credit reports, according to the inspector general’s office.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-08/dead-among-those-interviewed-in-faulty-background-checks.html
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