@discrepant I agree 100%. If OPM wants to get rid of the corruption and greed of the private equity firms, such as CACI and KGS, they absolutely can do this. It is an easy remedy…do direct federal contracts with independent contractors like the FBI, State Dept., and ATF already do. The contractors whom own their own business are generally very experienced, and actually care about getting all of the interviews since they get paid for actually interviewing people required for each lead or item and even for pages typed. Ind. Contractors aren’t out they’re RT UC’ing everything under the sun because they cannot get out from under their work like some F/T KGS and CACI employees do. It is the only option that makes any sense long term in this industry. Its practical, ethical, and OPM would get a thorough quality product.
However, I’m not holding my breath that OPM will do anything this intelligent. They have proven for way too long they are incapable of making the right choices to improve this industry.
Joe - You are somewhat correct. However, I have seen several 1099s take short cuts or not fully report developed info just to get the ESI done. Then they chose not to add the developed items because it may be a few miles outside their cost effective zone or other personal reason and schedule it out. I have cleaned up enough 1099 cases because of this. They pick & chose their cases and I totally understand. I would not travel 90 minutes one way just to interview a reference and get paid $50 and no mileage. If everyone is a 1099, who is doing those cases where you have to drive 90 miles to do a cold call neighborhood check?
It may work in metro or military bases but not in 90% of the country.
You know OPM will short change the 1099s on expenses and rates. They have already proven that with the contracts with USIS, KGS & CACI. I would not trust OPM to do the right thing.
Good suggestions. I really like discrepant’s idea of 1099’s working directly related for a field office/SAC. Yeah, the contractor ranks have some of the best investigators doing this work. If OPM doesn’t start hiring some of these experienced people, they will be in a bad way in a short time based on what I see. The solid and hardworking federal investigators (former DSS) I used to deal with are retiring and the new hiring requirements are bringing in vastly inferior types. I could tell you a few stories, but I think we all have them. And the reason for making the federal side more efficient and effective is important, because the worse the federal side gets the more reliant the process is on the contractor side, which invariably leads to the abuses and corruption we’ve seen in the past decade among the ‘too big to fail’ contractor companies (not just USIS). Both the federal and contractor side need to be solid for the integrity of the whole process.
You are correct. Not every contractor working the OPM contract is ethical or does the right thing at all times. Some independent contractors are lazy, write very poor case messages, and don’t schedule out necessary leads, etc. That’s why it’s important that if OPM were to do direct federal contracting that they pay for extensions, case messaging, etc. so that people have an incentive to do a thorough job. And they would have to have a mileage reimbursement unlike Keypoint that gives no mileage reimbursement. By giving a mileage reimbursement, now you eliminate in most cases the contractor that won’t give due diligence to drive into a neighborhood two or three times to get necessary coverage.
You get what you pay for in life…no different when paying for a federal background check.
About a month ago I wrote an article about individual contractors working directly for federal supervisors (SACs) at the field office level. We did this at DIS/DSS back in the mid-1990s and it worked very well at my field office. My article is posted at: https://news.clearancejobs.com/2016/01/17/1017165/. I also agree that the investigator’s manual needs to be significantly simplified and reduced in size and most of the checklists eliminated. But there first needs to be major organizational and cultural changes for field investigations. The people involved in the clearance reform effort seem to be to focused almost entirely on technology and computer accessible records with little or no interest in how field investigations are conducted. As good as computer accessible records may be for flagging a case for expansion, you can’t deny a security clearance based solely cyber vetting.
“I also agree that the investigator’s manual needs to be significantly simplified and reduced in size and most of the checklists eliminated.”
Absolutely. Things like having to interview 8 people to cover one employment where the Subject was in the same physical office the whole time, but switched employers due to contract changes, is a huge waste of time and money and resources. Investigations have been reduced to slavish adherence to case coverage requirements and doing what is required to pass review. It’s even worse than the idea in schooling of ‘teaching to the test’. It’s like teaching to the test instructions because content seems all but irrelevant. I’ve never had a re-open or a request to look into something or resolve something when a neighbor is mistaken about the Subject traveling to Iran (rather than Iraq) or North Korea (rather than S. Korea). I’ve never not had a re-open when I forgot to put a disclaimer of “exact date unknown” in the ROI after the statement that Source first met Subject in the early or mid 2000’s.
Contractors working directly for SACs seems like a good idea, but more applicable to the FTE contract investigators than independent CIs. Also, I think the production level would drop. When I was a FTE I never did not work off of the clock to meet short deadlines and complete over-assigned work. Contract companies bring in new employees, work them to extreme burnout, and then spit them out. I had a friend who worked as a FTE investigator for a couple years with the largest contractor. He’s a very diligent hard worker and was a former S/A (not OPM). He told me he worked a minimum of 6 days per week and 10 per day on average as a FTE CI. He quit a couple of years ago. I talked with him recently and he says he has PTSD from working the FTE CI job.
Mr. Henderson your article needs to be placed in front of the all the decision makers at NBIB. This article perfectly sums up many of the issues I have faced as a fulltime investigator and as a contract investigator. How can we get this article in front of Cobert? She needs to read this to realize how broken the field system is.
Thanks for all the responses. The rumor I heard was untrue from another Keypoint contractor that heard it from a F/T Keypoint employee. My apologies…these rumors just seem to swirl all the time in this industry.
Apparently, the rumor was created because the CEO of Keypoint was refuting in an email to employees what a Senator said that OPM will not be using or should not be using contractors to do this background work in the future. Apparently, the stupid F/T investigator didn’t read the email thoroughly and indicated that OPM would not be using Keypoint to do the work in the future.
Lesson learned…don’t put any truth in these rumors until they can be confirmed and substantiated.
The rhetoric coming from OPM is that contractors will play an integral role in this work moving forward to NBIB and into the future.
