Dept. of Interior Asst. Director of IT fakes college degrees

INVESTIGATORS
1

So, OPM uses the Department of Interior’s IT. As the tech blog Arstechnica explains:

“The two systems breached were the Electronic Official Personnel Folder (eOPF) system, an entity hosted for OPM at the Department of the Interior’s shared service data center, and the central database behind “EPIC,” the suite of software used by OPM’s Federal Investigative Service in order to collect data for government employee and contractor background investigations.”

Now today, we find out that an Assistant Director of IT at the Department of Interior, Faisal Ahmed, faked having college degrees. He didn’t have any, but made fake ones and transcripts to put in his federal employment file. He faked a bachelor’s from the University of Wisconsin and a master’s from the University of Central Florida. This went on for a half-decade and no one found out. It was only because of an inquisitive alumni person for the University of Central Florida that this was uncovered. Amazing.

National Journal (7/15/2015): How a Federal Employee with Fake Diplomas Worked at the Department of the Interior for Five Years

http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/how-a-federal-employee-with-fake-diplomas-worked-at-the-department-of-the-interior-for-five-years-20150715

This is why the investigative process can NOT be insourced to the Feds and the IT part MUST be outsourced to one of the powerhouse tech companies (Oracle, Amazon, etc.).

2

dcinv, good catch on this article. It begs a lot more questions then it answers, like: what type of background investigation was done and why was the education portion not conducted and flagged if it was done and no record found? Why did DOI security do so pre-employment checks that could have fleshed out his claims. (matching up addresses, work experience, education, and calling a few references). I run across this same thing and it did not take five years to run it to ground.