Hi everybody,
Has anyone, holding a DoS Diplomatic Security TS clearance, run into difficulties with companies when verifying the status of the clearance through JPAS?
Thanks
This is not surprising since JPAS is pretty much limited to DoD.
If you peruse these forums you’ll encounter many stories of difficulties with “reciprocity” between Dept of State and… well, pretty much anybody else.
State is…quite difficult to work with IMHO. I get nothing but runaround from them when trying to verify a clearance or cross a State clearance over. Reciprocity is supposed to work, but it doesn’t always work and nobody fears the federal law requiring them to cooperate. If you know the unclassified name of the proprietary system State uses as their repository you can reference it. But if nobody has access to it it is meaningless info. I had an applicant with a formal printout from State showing their clearance and my client refused to accept it. I submitted that to show them it likely existed if they would get out of their chair and just try to play nice in the sandbox with State. Went over like a lead balloon.
Diplomatic Security can he reached through JPAS’ customer service, where they have a DoD point of contact.
What I’m discovering is that, beside the problem of customers who might refuse a given clearance or the question of reciprocity, many security officers working for contracting companies will not do the foot work in order to have a clearance checked.
DoD clearances are more convenient than DoS.
Going further, a contracting company’s security officer, to whom I had forwarded the procedure in order to check my clearance, downright lied to me regarding the reasons why she didn’t get it done.
What I’m getting at is that customer’s clearance expectations are not always the reason why a clearance check goes nowhere.
In my many years of experience, I can tell you that most contractor security folks are very good. But there are enough out there that are not very good to cause problems. It seems that the ones that are not so good are working at places that don’t put the necessary resources into their security operation… as a result the good folks leave, the place gets subpar inspection results, they get yelled at by management and it is a vicious cycle.
Also I see that in many cases where a company maybe used to have five or six people in security, now maybe they are trying to get by with two or three and the lower level folks end up doing more than one job. During this period of transition that could lead to some additional headaches.
PS I only ever worked at contractors that did DoD or IC stuff and in those cases, they dealt with State Dept very very rarely! Perhaps an additional source of delay (and confusion)
1 Like
I agree, it’s a race to the bottom.
Both contractors and customers are affected by it.
1 Like