I recently heard that one of the VP’s that CACI hired to manage the OPM contract comes from Lockheed. Lockheed doesn’t have any investigative contracts that I am aware of. Makes one wonder…
Don’t trust CACI. Worked for them for 25 years and they tossed me out over junior employees. They also dropped their work force in this division by 60 people. The people left, they had them renegotiate their contracts for less money.
The management tossed away a 17 year contract. The employees got axed and the management got promoted.
Question to dcinv and inv74…
What’s the basis for your assertions about OPM’s / CACI’s demise in terms of the BI business? Sounds like a bunch of hyperbole to me based on nothing more than emotive speculation. I’m sure DoD is pissed. But that doesn’t mean anything substantive is going to change. We need facts, not bloviating, please.
hoerschel,
I don’t have any inside information. I’m just assuming this from events over the past year (the ‘too big to fail’ USIS sinking) and from what I read in the news and blogs (comments section specifically). Some of the comments to the Washington Post article on BIs on 6/15/15 were more revealing than the article. The best news on the BI business is to be found on this site. And the comments section used to be a good source of rumors and solid information. Now it seems as if investigators are clamming up, maybe out of paranoia or maybe they have just given up on caring.
Nothing is being relayed to the field. Communication from my team lead is non existent and even fellow coworkers are not talking about it. I watched the 2+ hour testimony on Cspan and that made me feel worse. I am not sure who is driving the ship…
Agreed; CACI is not set up to handle the work load, review/quality competence, rebuttal process or expertise to handle cases at the required work load. Mileage, rebuttal process, using a personal computer to do the majority of your work on (since changed - however still inept), is totally broken.
Yes I’ve read the article last week and was surprised when our team lead said the company has no official comment. Really?!? I mean do they think that we don’t read this stuff. As a leader wouldn’t you want to acknowledge this and let everyone know that your working on gaining a better perspective and obviously things need to change but no one knows… I mean they said nothing!!! How about the head of FISD did not know that the contractors pay according to source units transmitted. Really??? Again who is in charge??? Please someone do something. Say something!!! We know the leadership along with the Washington post reads these comments. If OPM does not know how contractors are paid how do they evaluate if it’s more cost effective to use contractors over employees?
Yeah, that comment by the head of FISD jumped out at me as well. Another was the comment about new standardization of quality. While focus on quantity is not quality, standardization of quality is not real quality. It only means a lot more work is done on cases which don’t need it and a lot less work on cases which do.
Field investigators need more latitude and less checking-of-boxes mechanical investigating. Their judgment and discretion should be trusted more as to which cases need more or less attention. A 22-year old college graduate entering into the military doesn’t need 18 personal sources for starters. But the coverage guidelines say he does because he was in four different on-campus dorms, had two part-time student campus jobs, and he was in school. Then tack on four REFEs. Meanwhile the divorced and lonely middle-aged guy going through a mid-life crisis with lots of travel overseas and decades of valuable knowledge will have the same level of clearance and only have two coworkers interviewed during his PPR.
Regarding this whole fiasco I will say this, while it makes sense to insource the IT work (or hand it over to DoD), insourcing the investigation work will only diminish quality. The caliber of talent in the contractor ranks cannot be equaled by GS employees. In the contractor ranks you have retired federal LEOs, agents, career police detectives, and CIA officers. By insourcing the investigative work you lose incalculable levels of experience in national security in all settings.
Maybe OPM needs to hand off the IT to a DoD-supervised Silicon Valley firm. Someone at OPM needs to call the patriotic Larry Ellison, traveling somewhere on his 454-foot yacht. Or go on “Shark Tank” and pitch their lucrative deal to tech guys like Mark Cuban and Robert Herjavec. Maybe make up some t-shirts, “Just say no to COBOL!” and “DOSucks!”
Well said dcinv! I’m not sure I understand why each individual contract investigator can’t have a direct 1099 relationship with OPM and drop from the prime contractors. It makes no sense to have multiple prime contractors performing the same administrative tasks to support a group of 1099 investigators all doing the same thing. But then I have to remember who I’m talking about. This agency that has no clue…
My money is on watching USAjobs.gov for a public relations position to help control the negative press coming from this:
Just when we thought the storm was ending - batten down the hatches the storm is getting worse.
Here’s the link to the C-SPAN video of the OPM hearings (you can watch it on your iPhone/iPad). At 1:07:00 Rep. Elijah Cummings has harsh questions and comments for the CIO of USIS re: Altegrity/USIS. The FBI and USDOJ needs to go after the leadership of this company, big time. Eric Hess, CEO of Keypoint was there, but no CACI.
She has a busy week! Tuesday I watched the senate appropriations subcommittee. Nothing to really see there as it seemed everyone already knew what they were going to say. The house oversight committee that you posted the link had some fireworks and was fun to watch. How about the $90,000 plus bonus the CIO from USIS received?!?! She will be at the Senate Homeland security committee meeting tomorrow on CSPAN. Not sure if that will have the same fireworks show as the house but should be interesting. I was also really shocked today when I heard OPM spent over $500 million in computer systems since 2008. I’m sure it wasn’t on PIPS and FDR. It was probably on developing the usajobs app that they are in the process of shutting down. There goes any glimpse of job security we may have had.
Rep. Cartwright goes after Keypoint and Eric Hess with both barrels at 2:47:00. Rep. Chaffetz and Cummings follow on. It’s brutal. The KPGS people with him did a poor job prepping him. Congressional testifying 101. It’s all theatre and posturing and acting. Mirror and respond to each MOC in direct proportion to his or her level and direction of rhetoric. When they are posing accusative rhetorical questions be contrite. When they are asking for things be 100% agreeable and acquiesce (you can be as responsive as an Italian government agency afterwards). When they are expressing outrage at the breakdown in cyber security express similar outrage.
Fox News Special report has had two days of coverage that you won’t find anywhere else. Here’s from Tuesday:
http://www.foxnews.com/transcript/2015/06/24/what-hack-attack-reveals-about-us-relations-with-china/
The transcript for Wednesday’s broadcast has not been posted yet but it is even more damning and includes a direct assertion that KPGS had an employee who triggered the most recent debacle. Then you have OPM director Archuleta being accused of petulence and her classic response.
Meantime, those of us in the maelstrom of conducting the actual investigations are getting ripped and re-opened for the most inane and arcane ‘errors’ while the whole enterprise goes to hell in a handbasket.
My understanding is that CACI does not use contract investigators but they use part time consultants? True?
The overwhelming number of clearance denials in 2015 have been for financial reasons:
http://www.dod.mil/dodgc/doha/industrial/2015.html
Business idea: security clearance consulting/high-interest loan company.
Now what are we going to do? 
FDR is down (compromised ?); JPAS is down, EQUIP is down, what the heck…
No one is seems to have any clue how long FDR will be down. Management has not told FI’s anything.
But we must press on…