"Long" Adjudication?

SECURITY CLEARANCE Q&A
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I submitted my eQip (secret clearance, DOD civilian job), in late March and had a subject interview in late April. He asked for documentation showing that my student loans hadn’t been 120+ days past due during the past 7 years (my credit report said they had been 120+ days past due at some point, but the report didn’t indicate when that occurred). I also provided an explanation on why they went past due at that time (around 2014, parents were paying them on auto-pay, got a new debit card and forgot to change it, didn’t realize it for a few months. Issue has long since been rectified).

I also disclosed that I filed my taxes a year late on two recent occasions. During the interview I explained my parents had both been ill, and then they both died and I got divorced all around the same time. Filing/paying my taxes fell off my radar. In both instances, I filed and paid the taxes when I filed/paid the subsequent year (e.g., filed 2018’s when I filed 2019’s, filed 2020’s when I filed 2021’s). I paid the debt in full at the time of filing. I explained all of this to the investigator. He did not ask for tax transcripts or anything like that. I have no other red flags (no arrests, drugs, foreign contacts), other than pretty significant student loan debt but everything is current and has been for several years. Employers were contacted, but no personal references have been.

Anyway, I last spoke to the investigator in mid-May and he said he was preparing to submit his report. Since then, crickets, even from my HR contact at the DoD (emailed him 2x, no response). Based off articles on here, the average adjudication period is 17 days, and if he submitted his report roughly when he said he did I’m at ~24 (working) days.

So what I’m wondering is:

  • Should I be worried about a “long” adjudication? What could this mean?
  • Is there someone I can/should contact other than the HR person for an update? I feel like even “we’re still waiting” would be helpful/comforting to me right now, but hearing absolutely nothing has me in a panic.
  • If anything else “came up” during the investigation, it would have been brought to my attention, right? There’s really nothing I’m hiding- I live a pretty boring life (and I’m already a periodically-investigated (non-clearance) federal employee), but I’m worrying myself sick thinking maybe they found something I forgot about.
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Just because your investigator finished his report from your interview doesn’t mean your case immediately went to adjudication. There are a lot of other moving parts behinds the scenes. I have also never heard the 17 day metric.

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I can’t speak to the fact about a long adjudication, but I can try on the others. For things that “come up”, this happened on my last investigation. Usually, the investigator will ask about it in the interview. For me, it was a few minor things that I forgot to include in the eQIP and I was able to clarify after he asked about them.

For me, my last investigation was 3 years ago and submitted for adjudication 22 days after I was terminated from the job that requested it. So I have no idea what happened to it (I submitted a FOIA request for adjudication results a few months ago and I’m still waiting).

Best of luck to you.

1 Like
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90% of closed investigations are required to be adjudicated within 20 days if no actionable issues are present. As others have mentioned, just because your investigator was done with his part does not mean your i vestigation closed. Other parts may still be pending, and there is no way for you to determine this.

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Thank you all for your feedback. I know nobody can give me a direct “yes” or “no”, but can anyone provide feedback on how “red” they think my flags might be?

If I were to receive a LOI, would it come through the DoD HR person I’ve been in contact with (via email)? Or via email from someone else (DOD CAF?) ? Or in the mail?