Has anyone ever been waived from passing a polygraph for medical reasons?

SECURITY CLEARANCE Q&A
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TS/SCI applicant here. Received a CJO with an intelligence agency in March 2024 and have been processing since. I took my polygraph in September—failed the first completely, then had a second the following day with a different examiner where I passed half the sections and was deemed “inconclusive” (i.e., failing) on the other half.

The thing is, I have medical conditions that complicate polygraphs. I’m a wheelchair user and couldn’t use their specialized poly exam chair/footplate, and I have a neurological disorder affecting my autonomic system that causes unpredictable changes in heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing. The agency is aware of my conditions; my doctors submitted extensive documentation and I passed the medical review in the same visit.

The second examiner was experienced with medically complex applicants and afterwards told me that if it were up to him, I’d go straight to adjudication since he definitely didn’t think I was lying, just that my disabilities made it impossible to gather enough usable data.

That was five months ago. Two months ago when I reached out, HR confirmed I was still pending security but gave no other information. I’m really hoping to avoid another polygraph. Does anyone know if I could have been sent to adjudication despite not fully passing the polygraph due to medical issues? I’m a new grad with a clean background. The polygraph flagged me for things that are easily disproven, like allegedly lying about mishandling classified info, despite never having had a government job or access to any classified material.

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That’s a good one. I don’t have any specific knowledge of situations like this (but that won’t stop me from posting) but any time they need to ask for some kind of exception to policy like this its got to be something that will proceed very Slo-o-o-ooo-wly

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I can’t address the medical aspect of the question but I can assure you that doing a two-round poly is totally normal, especially for people entering the IC for the first time. So being brought back after supposedly failing the first round is routine and something the agency plans for. I’m sure you noticed you were being asked a different set of questions the second time around on top of those that needed reexamination from the day before.

In my case, it was foreign contacts and the misuse of government technology, which, much like in your case, was virtually impossible since I never had access to any. Funny enough, I was told I hadn’t fully cleared the technology use but the examiner found a way to sort of implicitly tell me that he didn’t think it was a problem.

So again, while I can’t speak to the medical side of this, I think it is perfectly possible that you are in adjudication now, assuming all necessary steps have been completed, such as background investigation, physical/psych eval etc. Plus, if they needed you for another round of poly, I think they would have let you know by now. Just my two cents.

I hope you get some good news soon. Good luck!

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