I have been undergoing a Secret for a small maintenance contractor since early June of last year. The Investigation finished in November 2025, and I got a Rap Report with no apparent issues 2 months ago. I have been passed over for Interim status and have been waiting for adjudication since then.
I did go in for an interview, where I think the most dubious thing is that I thought my father was a dual citizen of Hong Kong SAR (which I put on the form because this is what I grew up believing) when actually his status is technically more something like having a green card. Both of my parents are naturalized citizens since the 80s, my mother from PRC and my father from British Hong Kong (pre-SAR), so people I know speculate that this is why my process is taking so long.
What is the ceiling on how long these things can drag out? I’ve been told by my point of contact at our parent company that there are two other people going through the same thing back at their HQ. I guess I have no right to complain since I’m getting paid pretty well to do very little since the SCIF is almost never declassified and most of our work is in there, but this really isn’t what I imagined my job would be and at this rate our contract is going to end before I even get to do serious work for this company.
13+ months is a little long for secret but not uncommon (it’s actually short for a TS, are you 100% positive this is Secret and not TS?). Unfortunately, the only people who can tell you how long it will be is the adjudicators. Your FSO can check the status for updates (if there is one).
If you have a lot of foreign contacts and/or foreign assets, that could very well be the hold-up. Most companies are aware of the lengthy process and will either find you something else to do or allow you to get another temp job while you wait.
I am 100% positive this is Secret, most of the information I would be dealing with is technically unclassified but because of how the information exists physically it is logistically inconvenient for them to separate it from the actual Secret content. I barely if ever speak to my extended family in Britain and HK and the family I would have contact with in the PRC passed away many many years ago at this point. The only assets I have are in American accounts and the only other financial discrepancy I can think of is that I technically didn’t file taxes for 2023 because of a hiccup with TurboTax that I didn’t become aware of until last tax year, but I didn’t owe anything that year anyways and I haven’t figured out how to backfile/amend that year through Turbotax yet. This was also explained in the interview but I can’t imagine this being an issue.
I have been in touch with my FSO periodically but every time she has said there’s no updates.
Said it a million times but bears saying it again. No News Is Good News. Just have to be patient and do unclass work or look for temp jobs while you wait, or find something else.
For TurboTax, you SHOULD be able to file and amended return by running the 2023 version of TT. Each year is a new version of TT and they are not backward compatible. If you uninstalled TT 2023, re-install it and see if that works.