Six year PR submission window only for contractors?

SECURITY CLEARANCE Q&A
1

About a year ago, DSS said that the five-year periodic update requirement for contractors would be temporarily extended to six years:

Effective immediately, DSS will submit Tier 5 Periodic Reinvestigations (PRs) for industry personnel six years after the date of the previous investigation rather than at the five-year mark to the National Background Investigations Bureau (NBIB) of the Office of Personnel Management. This change in periodicity will be reevaluated prior to December 31, 2017. (originally posted on 1/6/2017)

Does this also apply to government personnel?

Also, I did not see anything on the DSS PSMO-I website about any reevaluation of the new policy.

2

DSS posted on 12/22 that the current policy remains in effect until notified otherwise. It is up to each agency as to whether they want to adopt the same policy or continue with the 5 year cycles, and I would bet most are doing PRs at five.

3

Does this part of your reply refer to government employees?

4

Yes it does, DSS policy applies to industry only.

5

Thanks. Although I have heard a couple of stories of government employees whose investigations did get out of scope. In fact some have speculated that part of the reason for the backlog was a crackdown on this wink-and-a-nod arrangement where government employees were not having their investigations and/or polygraphs updated on time, and this added a fairly large number of cases to an already saturated system.