I recently accepted a job offer from DEA with contingent upon eligibility. I submitted my E-qip on 08/19/2012 and had my fingerprint process on 08/22/2012. I had an interview with a contract investigator on 09/07/2012 and she told me she would send all the documents out on that day. I called my project manager and informed him about this interview and he told me that we just need to wait for an interim from DOD. He said it would take up to 6 weeks but he still has no clue. I just called him again today 09/21 and he’s still waiting for an interim from DOD.
I have a clear record and have lived at 3 different addresses in the same city and state in the last 10 years. I’m just a little frustrated and I just cant wait to resign at my old job as soon as possible.
Please advise me some information if anybody knows or has the same situation.
I appreciate the info,
Thank you much.
Quite possibly that entire OP was classified material! When I had a clearance, we were told not to publicly discuss even mundane stuff like that.
Here’s a story I can probably tell. (Hey, it was 35 years ago.) Where I worked, new hires could start “work” at once, without waiting for their clearance to come through. Well, they didn’t actually start work. They sat on their hands in an unclassified area in the back of the HR building, with pay, for however many weeks it took (within some limits). The room was called “the cooler”. I surmise that lots of crossword puzzles were done.
I was one of the relatively few exceptions. I was hired into a department that included some operations in a not-quite-so-highly-classified area. There were about a half-dozen of us new hires then. We were escorted in; had to stay in the same room all day, with an escort there watching us the whole time (the guys who trained us were the escorts); they they escorted us out the gate.
If you didn’t get an Interim Secret pretty quickly, you are in the 3-6 month bracket for the real deal. Sad but true. Now if you need an Interim TS in order to start work, then you are still in the 3-6 month bracket.
And even if you haven’t moved, if you are married to or have close associations with a foreign national, then that adds time to the investigation process
The whole security clearance process is bizarro and it’s gotten worse since 2001. I waited about 3 months in 1997 for the clearances for a job, worked that job for 3 years, then moved back to where I was before I was hired. Four years later, I was rehired and this time the clearance process took, literally, a year and a day. I’m assuming they redid the whole thing because there’s no way it could have taken them that long to investigate the intervening 4 years. And it was in 2004-2005. The record holder was a guy whose clearance took over 2 years, tho he was married to a foreign national, so I’m sure that stretched things out a bit.
Like Duckster said, it’s a pretty bad idea to be talking about the security clearance process – how long they take, etc. – on a public, international message board. Let alone announcing that you have/will be getting one.
DEA is a little slower than most DoD places to get your interim, but I have seen the interim granted in less than a week. If you don’t have it after maybe 3 weeks it may be the 3 - 6 month wait because something DID show up. Don’t count on them ever telling you what it was and it will probably be a mistake on their part if you really have a clean background.
and Yes, when you get your clearance don’t talk about having one, but they will tell you that during your initial briefing. Since you haven’t been briefed yet, you are not really doing anything wrong here.