I’ve worked for the federal government for 37 years, and in my current position for 13. My current position is considered “sensitive”, as I have access to individuals’ personal information. I went through a thorough investigation when I was hired for this position 13 yrs ago, and policy is to re-do the check every 5 years. I am in the process of undergoing my 3d such background check (counting the initial one.) I’ve been fingerprinted repeatedly, and file annual financial disclosure forms.
I am not really objecting to the check, as I just figure it is required by some law that applies to tens of thousands of employees in the same boat as me (there are 1200 in my position alone.) And I could imagine some check along the lines of, “Has anything changed since 5 years ago? Do you have any substance/legal/financial issues.” Maybe run a credit check and search of legal data bases.
But the form was 40 pages long, asking that I enter such info as the dates I graduated from college 45 years ago, and the specific dates that my mother, mother-in-law, and sisters used their maiden names (both mothers long dead, sisters all married 35+ years.) As standard part of the process, an investigator came to my office to interview me for over an hour. He’s now writing up a report that someone else will review and approve/disapprove.
Like I said, it is a bit of a hassle, but I was able to do it on the clock, so I’m not really complaining. But for the life of me, I’m trying to figure out why this is anything other than a major waste of tme and effort for both me and the reviewers/investigators.
I was wondering if anyone with personnel and/or security experience might be able to explain what sorts of things they are looking for that would make this worth the considerable expense.
Has/is your job changing to interact with data with national security implications? What you describe (plus a poly) is pretty bog standard for higher levels of clearance for handling national security information.
If not, then maybe someone had the bright idea that if it’s good enough for TS, it’s also good enough for CUI/PII.
What are they looking for? It’s simple: Can they trust you? The more context they have about you and your life, the better they can assess this simple question.
The fact is that the main threat against leakage of critical information is not hacking (or phishing), it’s the Insider Threat.
If your agency is within DoD, or uses DoD for background checks, your prior application may be in the eQIP system. Makes re-applications much easier, IME.
Maybe they want to compare the answers that you’ve given over the years to see if they’ve changed? I held TS in several positions since the 70s but I don’t recall the questionnaire being that long. Then again, my last SBI was circa 2010.
My job is termed “sensitive” - definitely NOT secret, let alone top secret. My kid has a top secret clearance for his work for a defense contractor. Definitely a completely different beast.
And I’m not in any way defense related. Tho the investigator was a contractor with some defense department.
And folk in my position have been pretty famously corrupt in the past. But I’m not sure how that would be rooted out from my MIL’s maiden name.
This exercise seems primarily aimed at identifying how carefully people complete annoying and intrusive forms. Like I said, I’m not really complaining, as I got paid for my time - the same as I get paid for some worthless training or meeting. But given the obvious effort and expense, I just kinda wonder at the purpose.
Like I said, look at my financial records. Check my name/SSN/fingerprints against legal records. Give me a whiz quiz. But I don’t understand the purpose behind this policy.
If I were assuming a false identity, I’d choose one a heckuva lot more interesting than my own!
I would imagine what they mostly check is money. People do give and recieve money within the family. Knowing all the names of family members means that if they discover a large payment to or from an unknown person, they can check it against a comprehensive list of family members first.
I also bet a lot of it is because one time, a red flag popped in sone investigation and it took some amout of time to figure out it was something innocuous, so now they ask everyone “just in case”. Asking 10k people to each spend 15 minutes looking something up in order to make sure the information is there the 1 in 10k times you need it is classic bureaucratic thinking.
I think they also check for things you might be embarrassed - and potentially “blackmailed” about. Like convictions, lawsuits, workplace disciplinary actions (which you would think my employer has access to…)
But I don’t understand the reason for asking me to repeat remote info that I’ve given them before - and that they’ve passed me on before. Like the date I graduated from college 40 yrs ago. Sure, they can use my responses to look for inconsistencies. But other than suggesting carelessness in my completion of these forms, I’m not sure what meaningful info that would provide. If this is done every 5 years, I could imagine them asking about stuff over the past - say - 7 years. Or ask if anything had changed since my last form.
But I got paid for my time. And if they want to fire me, well, I was planning on retiring in 3 years anyway!
“There have been various attempts to explain why people become spies. One common theory is summed up by the acronym MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise or Coercion , and Ego or Extortion.”
I have friends who are smart and highly educated who – early – supported Trump on the theory that his money meant he couldn’t be bought.
He has dramatically less money (ie, far more debt) than those people thought, and far more ego/deep-seated insecurity than any of us could possibly have imagined.
As a National Security matter, that’s Bad.
I know what you do for a living. You would not be high on my list of those likely to be offered, or to accept, bribes (or be vulnerable to extortion), but it’s obviously not beyond the realm of possibility.
Understanding a fair bit about your life can help ferret out where your vulnerabilities might lie, and then attempting to quantify or characterize the risk.
I think it means they don’t want to look up the other forms or figure put how to import information across forms, and its easier to juat ask you to do it all again.
I’m sure it’s some sort of bureaucratic reason. I worked for a small state agency that was later merged with a much larger one. And all sorts of procedures changed - in ways that didn’t make much sense. My salary was above the threshold for financial disclosures but my title was exempt in the original agency, because I didn’t make any of the sort of decisions those disclosures were meant for. I couldn’t decide where to buy paper clips , much less who provided vehicle maintenance or which contractor was hired for renovations. Which doesn’t mean that there was no possible reason why someone would try to bribe me - but those reasons also applied to people below the threshold. In the new agency, mine was the only exempt title, so they eliminated the exemption for the sake of standardization, I guess. In the new agency , every time someone applied for a promotion, they had to fill out a completely new job application. If you applied for six promotions over the course of a year ( which would have been the same job in six different bureaus) , that was six new applications. I suppose it made a little bit of sense for positions open to outside candidates - but new applications were required even for positions that were only open to current employees. We were fingerprinted upon hiring - and I know for a fact that the agency was notified of arrests and suspended/revoked/expired driver’s licenses so it wasn’t to find out about those things. I guess it might have been to try to catch me in a discrepancy between the form I’m filling out now and the one I filled out when I was first hired 20+ years ago.
Marital status is certainly subject to change within a 5-year period. Just think, you could marry a new person and have a whole new set of in-laws whose maiden names you had to worry about.
Sure. That’s why “if I ran the world” it would ask, “What has changed since your prior review?” As it is, it seems almost like an exercise of “Gotcha!” to catch typos and carelessness. And, at least as far as I am concerned, the seeming pointlessness of the exercise encourages me to be less careful than I otherwise might be.
Not the most pointless or irritating thing I’ve had to do in my 37 year career. I was just wondering if there might be some explanation other than, “cumbersome bureaucracy.”
I bet they redo it from scratch, whatever investigation they do. They never look at the old form. That is wht you have to fill out this one. Its as if you are an entirely new situation.
Right. But why would they? Do they presume they missed something the last time? Are there other “business/industry” practices, where they redo everything from scratch each time around. Especially when there seems to be no problem with a long time employee/practice?
Just seems so inefficient. You are in education, right? Imagine if each year, each teacher completely rebuilt their lesson plans from scratch. Even tho they are teaching the exact same course/level that they taught last year and several years prior, with no apparent problems and - instead - apparent success?
Sure, you update things. And maybe if you feel something has gotten stale, you look for ways to refresh it. But you don’t just cause yourself unnecessary effort.
I assume it is primarily a reflection of bureaucratic behavior at its purest. Some department (in DoD, surprise, surprise) has figured out that it can get a certain level of funding to conduct a certain number of investigations, with no one asking whether they can do it more efficiently or what benefit results from their actions. If they have to do more investigations next year, well, just ask for more $. Meanwhile, they get to spout the boogeyman rationale of “SECURITY!” There is no incentive for them to even try to save money. To the contrary, their incentive is to argue that they need MORE funding and MORE staff…
When working in a bureaucracy and confronted with such meaningless inefficiency, I find it challenges my inclination to strive for efficiency myself.
I imagine they go through the steps of the actual investigation every time in case something was missed or done incorrectly last time. Like a safety inspection of an airplane: probably some things, once checked, could never possibly go “bad”, but they still check them every time.
Given that, its more trouble from their point of view to have to check an original form and an updated form. It would be like grocery shopping with a “standard” grocery list and an addendum. Sure, it’s easier for the person making the addendum to just say “no eggs this time, but twice as much milk as usual and get a watermelon”, but for the person shopping, that means that for every item on the list, they have to check against the addendum to make sure it isn’t mentioned.
So sure, it’s inefficient for you, but it’s more efficient for them, and that’s what they care about.
What would be ideal is an updatable copy of the original, but this procedure was probably in place long before that was feasible, and there’s not much incentive to change.
ETA: the pro tip for you would be to screenshot or print the form, if that’s allowed, so you can just copy it over next time.
Yes, I kept a hardcopy of my SF-86 (I assume that is the form Dinsdale had to submit) to use as a reference for the next time I needed to fill it out. Some things seemed silly, I put down a PO Box number down for the address of my University, but an investigator called me and insisted on a street address. I called the actual building where my college was located, and they didn’t know the address, all mail was simply addressed to Engineering Hall. They eventually guessed that 101 Engineering Avenue should work, so I went with that. The investigator was satisfied with that bit of bullshit. Strange guy, a bit high strung.
Anyway, back to the Dinsdale’s OP. Background checks are transitioning to something called ‘Continuous Vetting’ and I suspect that having an SF-86 on file is probably a baseline document for that process.
