Excellent advice. Now that I have my clearance, I try my best to remain squeaky clean. If I drink some beer somewhere, I don’t even *think *about getting behind the wheel, as an arrest could jepordize my clearance (not to mention the legal and ethical issues).
Having a clearance pulled for a security violation can not only prevent you from getting government jobs, but also government contracting work. I had to have a State Department TS at one point, then a DISCO secret when I worked in Brussels for an American contractor, then another SD TS for six years, and then had to have another clearance investigation five years later to work for a contractor involved in government contracts, and then yet again for similar work. That’s a lot of income I could have lost just by doing something stupid.
When i pled guilty to the DUI, the court mandated that I take 6 Alcohol Education Programs (AEP) classes and attend 6 AA meetings. There is a section on the SF 86 after the Police Record Section that asks “Have you EVER been ordered, advised, or asked to seek counseling or treatment as a result of your use of alcohol?” (Use of Alcohol Section) Would AEP and AA be considered counseling or treatment? I feel that it is not but I want to be 100% sure.
Again, tell them everything. Tell them about the six classes and six meetings and how the court ordered you to go to them. You can say, “I’m not sure if this counts, but here is what the court ordered and here is what I did to satisfy the court.” Always tell them anything that might be relevant. Explain why you’re not sure if something is really what they’re asking for. Let them decide what is relevant.
Bankruptcy is not an automatic disqualification. Even for a TS.
I suspect that whether a bankruptcy will disqualify you depends on how the bankruptcy occurred. Suppose that you and your wife worked at jobs which didn’t offer health insurance, but she got cancer and had huge medical bills for her treatment, despite which she eventually died. You couldn’t possibly pay off the bills and your mortgage payments got further and further behind, although you didn’t have an expensive house. Meanwhile the value of houses in your neighborhood was dropping. Finally you sold the house for much less than you bought it for and moved to a cheap apartment. You had no choice at that point except to declare bankruptcy. In that case I suspect you will be able to get a clearance.
On the other hand, suppose that you bought a car and a house that were clearly too expensive for someone with your income. You spent lots of money on entertainment, which meant in your case that you spent most of your evenings drinking and carousing around. You took expensive vacations. You piled up huge credit card debts and finally you had to declare bankruptcy, but by that time your car had been repossessed and you lost your house because you couldn’t make the mortgage payments. In that case I suspect you won’t be able to get a clearance.
I just got my Secret clearance a month and half ago, after 4 months of investigation roughly. I had some dings in my history too, mostly financial. What I did was to get a copy of my credit report, and scrubbed through it for every ding, and then I explained each ding in detail, why it happened, and how I took care of it or how I planned to take care of it.
And though others have said there is no interview for Secret, that wasn’t true in my case. About two months in to the process, I was called for an interview with a reviewer. I spent about 3.5 hrs talking to him about every aspect of my clearance paperwork, with very detailed questioning about my financial situations and what my plans were for fulfilling those obligations. I also volunteered information I realized I had inadvertantly left out of my paperwork - don’t ask me how, but somehow I had forgotten to list my little sister’s baby daddy, who is a Turkish national, on my list of contacts with foreign nationals.
After the interview, the reviewer (who was a great guy, very casual and not what I expected) told me that he could not tell me whether I did good or bad, could not tell me if or when the clearance would go through, but that he appreciated my honesty and preparedness to answer his questions. A month and half later, I was informed that I was granted clearance.
On a related note, I recently ran into a former coworker who had held a Secret clearance that lapsed over the course of her employment. She had to reapply, and in doing so, “forgot” (she claims) to list some financial matters that had come up during her employment and while she held her clearance. She was denied a renewal, and worse, informed that by “falsifying” her paperwork, she was not welcome to apply again. It cost her her job, and any further jobs in this industry, and in this town, govt work is the only thing that really pays.
So when they say be honest and thorough, with just the facts, BE HONEST AND THOROUGH WITH JUST THE FACTS.
Not true, and an excellent example of how one false statement can propagate wildly.
This claim was made in a Human Rights Watch report, and since then has been repeated credulously by all sorts of other publications. In this Staff Report, Gfactor and I comment on the issue:
I was a contractor for the govt for over 15 years. I don’t see there being a problem for a secret clearance. People who have done worse than what you have listed worked with me for years.
Good luck.
You guess wrong. I’ve been on both helping people get security clearances and I have had to get them. A bankruptcy for either reason is not a disqualification. They have loosened it up quite a bit in the last ten years (many more people needing clearances, more financial troubles). I have seen people get Top Secret with bankruptcy for being over extended.
They knock on your neighbors’ doors (seriously). Sometimes they’ll phone first to set up a time to stop by. Hereabouts (DC metro) we’ve periodically been asked by neighbors / friends if we’d mind having our names given to the investigators.
Back when we lived in NC, and Typo Knig was getting a clearance prior to moving up here, the local FBI office handled the local inquiries. I had several different neighbors come to me, and say “did you know the FBI was ASKING ABOUT YOUR HUSBAND???” :p.
Anyway - that’s one of the ways they’d find out about the girlfriend.
Re the interim clearance: I don’t honestly know much about that process. I would assume you could, ultimately, get a real clearance as long as you keep your nose clean, avoid getting into any more debt, 'fess up about everything you’ve told us (and anything you haven’t)… Basically you want to look like you’re not at risk for being blackmailable or controllable through money.
Clearance investigators can be funny sometimes. A fellow I knew had a name that sounded like a brand of liquor, and one version of that was called “black label”. So his friends called him “Doctor so-and-so black label”, which apparently really raised some flags with the investigator.
I’ve never had a security clearance, but aren’t there security clearances (Confidential or Secret) and SECURITY CLEARANCES (Sensitive Compartmented Information)? Which one is the OP going for?
I’ve read about and have very brief personal experience with the multitude of background checks required for what used to be known at LLNL as a “Q” clearance (no idea what they call it now) and find it difficult to believe that level of scrutiny is applied to everyone who needs a clearance for Secret information. Even back in the 90s, according to the book Nuclear Rites, the backlog of background investigations were sufficient to make the average wait to get Q-cleared ~1 year. Aren’t a lot of the relatives’ interviews and neighbors’ interviews that e.g,. Mama Zappa describes, only done if you’re going for one of the higher clearances?
A friend of mine was being investigated for a clearance, and the investigator was stopping by the neighbor’s house - where my friend was mowing the lawn. Assuming that my friend was the neighbor, the investigator asked “Do you know Mr. Friend-of-Andy-L?” “Yes, I do.” Further questions ensued, until the investigator asked “And what is your name?” “Mr. Friend-Of-Andy-L”. The investigator then went to the door of the neighbor’s house, to ask all the questions again, but this time, he started with the question about who he was talking to, first.
Seriously, Loach? You mean to say that if someone who makes $50,000 a year buys a car for $80,000 and a house for $500,000 (neither with any cash up front, just monthly payments for the car and a mortgage for the house) and runs up a debt of $40,000 on his credit cards and then loses the car and the house for not being able to make the payments and declares bankruptcy rather than paying off the credit cards, they could still get a clearance? There are people who are overextended for no reason except that the housing market went downhill and they were thus way under water, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Are you sure that someone who ran up absurdly huge, stupid debts is going to get a clearance? (Yes, I realize that whoever made the loans to such an idiot is also in the wrong.)
DoD (Department of Defense) and DoE (Dept of Energy) have equivalent clearances by different names. This is often a point of confusion.
DoD clearances are Confidential, Secret and Top Secret.
DoE clearances are L and Q, equivalent to Secret and Top Secret.
SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information) is not an “Above Top Secret Double Secret” clearance.
It is assigned on a need to know basis regardless of clearance level and must be sponsored.
In addition, there is a non-clearance level called “Public Trust Position”, that also requires background checks.
For this, you submit form SF85P. The clearance form is SF86 and there is not a lot of difference.
I work at a military installation and a lot of facilities have their own local security requirements whether you have a clearance or not.
Does anyone with experience in these matters think that a $100,000 student loan would cause a problem?
I don’t know what degrees the OP has, but that is a lot of money. Would the government take that into consideration? Do the skills mastered through that degree have weight in such cases?
Seriously. This is GQ not speculation. I know from personal experience.
There is no bright line as to how much debt or how bad a bankruptcy can be before they will not grant you a clearance. So throwing numbers out there will not get you an answer.
The question I asked was not really about “how bad a debt or how bad a bankruptcy.” The question was also not really about the amount of money. The question was about the stupidity involved in the money borrowed. Do you really mean that someone who borrowed an amount of money so large that there’s no conceivable way he could repay it short of winning several million dollars in the lottery would still have a good shot at getting a clearance? Do you actually know anyone who borrowed a stupidly large amount of money who got a clearance?
I know someone who was deployed when his wife found a house she wanted to move to. He stupidly allowed her to do all the leg work and trusted her judgement. He signed all the appropriate paperwork. It wasn’t till later that it became clear that she was sweet talked into a house they couldn’t afford by a slimy real estate agent and his mortgage guy. A Chapter 13 bankruptcy happened. At the time he needed a Secret clearance. Nothing happened to it. A couple years later he needed Top Secret. The financial problems came up but it did not disqualify. TS was granted.
As you may have guessed that person was me. No other derogatory items on the record. Like I said there is no bright line. There is no level of debt that disqualifies you. They weigh it along with everything else. I can not answer your question as asked. There is no level of debt in which the will automatically disqualify you. It will be looked at and can be used as a factor to disqualify you. As I said up thread, financial problems used to be a disqualification. But in the last 10 years they have needed a lot more people with clearances. They were disqualifying too many for financial reasons. They realized that debt will not cause everyone to run to the Commies like they thought in the past. They loosened up the standards. You can choose not to believe me. I don’t much care at this point.
Thanks for the clarifications. The wiki for the topic is surprisingly detailed. I didn’t realize that you needed the whole SSBI rigamarole for a TS clearance. Ignorance fought.
Good luck, BCP10. Let us know how it all turned out.