Like many people, you may be ringing in the new year by considering your financial goals for the coming year. Unfortunately, if your path to financial freedom involves finding a cohabitant who can pay the majority of your bills for you – that may not help you mitigate your money issues for a clearance eligibility determination.
True or False: If a cohabitant is to blame for your financial issues, that’s a mitigating factor.
The whole-person concept is at work to help many individuals maintain their clearance eligibility despite – sometimes significant – baggage or issues. We advocate frequently here that the security clearance process is not a ‘perfect person’ process. The whole person concept enables that by looking at potential security risks under the backdrop of the overall reliability and trustworthiness of an applicant. The questions are less about how you’ve handled classified information (although that is a category that gets some attention in the updated Personnel Vetting Questionnaire), but more about how you’ve handled other potentially sticky situations in your life to-date. Financial issues are the top cause of clearance and denial and revocation, not because finances are the only thing that will cause an individual to breach classified material (finances can be one factor, but are typically paired with issues of ego and narcissism). But finances are an issue because they generally display a potential risk factor of blackmail, along with the double-edged sword of poor management (and we know that when it comes to insider threats, most breaches are unintentional – but just as disastrous).
Cohabitants and Clearance Troubles
In a recent case brought before the Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals (DOHA), an applicant was fifty years old and held a Secret clearance for a defense contracting position. He had a cohabitant from 2004 through 2020. He had delinquent taxes from 2018 through 2020, and a number of delinquent debts which the applicant blamed on his cohabitant, and that his life had improved since he separated from that cohabitant in 2020.
It’s not the first time a security clearance holder has tried to blame financial issues on a spouse or cohabitant. Unfortunately, even if the other party has known issues causing the financial difficulty, ‘blaming’ another party doesn’t mitigate the issues – because the vulnerability is still there. In this case, the applicant took the bold move of noting that he had moved in with a new girlfriend who makes a significant salary and pays for the majority of living expenses, enabling the clearance holder to contribute just $700 each month to his living expenses and theoretically creating a new situation of being in the black.
Unfortunately, a new sugar mama being willing to pay for living expenses is not a mitigating factor in a security clearance determination. It’s a temporary change in circumstances that could just as easily tip in the other direction – and leave the clearance holder scrambling for a place to live and a way to pay his bills.
False: Blaming a Cohabitant (either positively or negatively), can’t help your clearance eligibility.
In this case, the applicant tried to blame his financial issues on his previous cohabitant – and then use his new cohabitant as a mark in his favor. I admire the applicant’s new success in life – but unfortunately, a sugar mama may save your financial situation, but she can’t save your security clearance.
