ClearanceJobs sat down with William Henderson, co-founder of the Federal Clearance Assistance Service and a regular contributor to ClearanceJobs.com to discuss the current state of the security clearance process. Topics addressed include:
- An update on the National Background Investigation Bureau (NBIB)
- Security clearance technology
- Changes to the Periodic Reinvestigation interval
- Insider threat programs and continuous evaluation
“They seem to have a lot of conflicting priorities, but none of the problems seem to actually be handled as a priorities,” notes Henderson . “They seem very focused on the Insider Threat problem right now, and that’s directly related to continuous evaluation and periodic reinvestigations. And they just announced they were changing the periodic reinvestigations interval, at least for industry, from five years, to six year intervals, which doesn’t seem to really support their insider threat program.”
Henderson noted that it appears the government only has plans to apply continuous evaluation on 5 percent of the Top Secret cleared population in the coming year.
When it comes to the NBIB, so far it appears to be largely business as usual for OPM’s newest investigative agency. And while it may seem strange for progress to be so slow, slow seems to be the norm for the security clearance process.
“Even the revised federal investigative standards which were approved in December of 2012 have not been fully implemented,” said Henderson. “I’m at a loss as to why the government takes so long to do these things…everything seems to drag on and on and on, without being finalized.”
