The Cure for What Ails the Government’s Security Clearance Process: Automation

A recent survey conducted among federal facility security officers, the people entrusted with overseeing cleared facilities and personnel within government contractors, raises concerns about the state of the security clearance process. 

The survey findings highlight recurring inefficiencies, such as the dependence on paper-based systems for managing security-cleared personnel, reliance on manual processes, and excessive processing times. This presents a compelling opportunity for automation-driven disruption. 

Long Processing Times

Despite recent improvements, security clearance processing times remain the number one pain point for facility security officers. For higher-tier clearances, it takes 75 days on average to complete the application, investigation, and adjudication processes. For moderate-tier clearances, the time is 40 days on average. 

This prolonged hiring pipeline creates significant challenges not only for the many military and intelligence agencies that urgently need security-cleared talent to conduct their vital missions but also for the thousands of contractors that support them and likewise need skilled employees with security clearances. 

Manual Processes

Additionally, many agencies still employ manual approaches to collect and process needed information from job candidates. Of course, these two concerns are related: manual processes take far longer than automated processes. Manual process also creates more room for error and subpar results.

The good news is there has been some progress made as agencies transition to the Trusted Workforce 2.0 initiative, a governmentwide reform effort to overhaul the personnel vetting process by creating one governmentwide system that allows reciprocity across organizations. A key feature of the initiative  is the Continuous Vetting program, in which agencies must regularly review a cleared individual’s background to ensure they continue to meet security clearance requirements and should continue to hold positions of trust. 

Nevertheless, many agencies today still dedicate considerable staff time and resources to manually key data from various paper and digital documents into their business systems to process clearance adjudications. Sources for this needed data include driver’s licenses, passports, application forms, background investigation notes, bank records, employment records, law enforcement records, court records, property records, spreadsheets, and more.

Much additional time and expense is spent on the manual process of verifying or enriching that extracted data about a job candidate through third-party databases. 

Automating Security Clearance Workflows

What many federal agencies and commercial companies are learning is that it is possible to dramatically reduce the amount of time and money spent on this kind of manual work by using artificial intelligence, optical character recognition, natural language processing, API connections, and other modern technologies. 

Many large enterprises employ these technologies today to automate even highly complex internal business processes with very accurate results. 

So, for example, machines are now fully capable — with very little training of their algorithms needed — of understanding what they are seeing in a paper or digital document, extracting the data they need, validating that data by comparing it to data from other sources, enriching that data by combining it with related data from third-party databases, and pushing that data to back-end business systems, such as Salesforce, where it can be acted on at machine speed. 

Being able to automatically validate and enrich data will be increasingly important as agencies transition to Continuous Vetting, in which automated record checks pull data from criminal, terrorism, and financial databases, as well as public records, periodically while an individual possesses a security clearance. Automated validation and enrichment can help authorities determine whether an alert that pops up during those records checks is valid and worthy of further investigation.

Automating the manual work associated with security clearance applications, investigations, and adjudications has the additional benefit of improving results because there are fewer errors. This is a growing concern for many federal agencies as many highly experienced employees retire and are replaced by newer employees. 

In fact, the same survey found that 17% of respondents cited application errors as their biggest pain point — up five percentage points from the previous year. 

In conclusion, the government’s security clearance application and monitoring processes still take far more time and manual effort than they should. But most, if not all, of the manual steps traditionally done by federal employees or contractors can now be done very accurately by modern technologies. 

Federal agencies with security clearance responsibilities may be surprised at how capable and versatile these technologies are today and by their potential to significantly transform this critical function of government.

Erin O'Brien Hawley is vice president of federal at Instabase, an artificial intelligence and workflow automation company based in San Francisco.