Defense personnel security clearance information is incomplete, GAO says
Pentagon and OPM have reduced processing times, but took four months to vet nearly 40 percent of initial security clearances in fiscal 2008.
Although the Defense Department has reduced the time it takes to process personnel security clearances, many clearance authorizations are still taking more than four months to complete -- and some lack important information, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office released on Tuesday.
Defense and the Office of Personnel Management reported that the fastest 90 percent of initial security clearances for military and defense civilians were processed in an average of 124 days in 2008. But when GAO studied 100 percent of the initial clearances completed in 2008, the watchdog agency found that 39 percent took more than 120 days to finalize, while 11 percent took more than 300 days to process.
Under statutory reporting requirements related to the security clearance process, the executive branch can exclude the slowest 10 percent of clearances from the information it provides to Congress.
The report also found that of the 3,500 Top Secret clearances adjudicated in July 2008, 87 percent were missing at least one key piece of documentation -- most often, employment verification. Twelve percent of those clearances also did not include a personal interview.
The GAO report recommended that OPM and Defense provide complete statistics to Congress for its review of the security clearance procedure.
"The absence of comprehensive reporting limits full visibility over the timeliness of initial clearance decisions," said the report.
Officials from Defense and the Office of Management and Budget both agreed with the report and its conclusions, but OPM -- which took over the investigative portion of Defense's clearance process in 2005 -- did not tell GAO whether it agreed with its recommendations and defended the progress it has made with the process, according to the report.
"OPM commented that it took a critical program in disarray and turned it around under very challenging conditions," the report stated.
Defense's personnel security clearance process has been on GAO's high-risk list since 2005.