I received a final offer letter stating that I was being appointed under a pre-employment background investigation waiver that was approved by my agencies executive office. This lets me start work before completing the full background check, but if it’s not favorable in the end, I could be terminated.
It is an amazing opportunity for me,
but I don’t love the prospect of being terminated if found unfavorably adjudicated (had some red flags on my forms). HR said they would not push back my start date.
Does anyone have experience with this before? Does this mean they think I am likely to be favorably adjudicated, or does this mean nothing? Any advice is greatly appreciated!
I think it does mean that the agency feels you are likely to get the final approval, but of course there are no guarantees.
There was another post on here from a person in law enforcement who got the final background check, started the job, but was then terminated. So you never know.
Anyway it will likely take them MONTHS to get to the final adjudication so get in there and make the most of it!
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Had no idea this was possible. Are you local to the job site area?
Personally, I would avoid any scenario where I’d be starting something new with so much uncertainty over my head, particularly having to give up decent current employment and/or relocate to a new area.
That being said, if this option is better than your current situation, then of course it would make sense to move forward and try to seize the opportunity.
It’s called an interim security clearance.
You wouldn’t be granted one if the agency believed that your background was a lost cause, so your odds of getting the final clearance are pretty decent at the very least.
Not necessarily… I heard of a situation where someone was able to start the job, do all the inprocessing, work on some unclassified stuff, but did not have access to classified info until the clearance was granted. Apparently only part of that job involved classified info, there was a lot of unclas work.
That’s true too. They can do that as well, depending on the employer and the volume of unclassified work available.
When I first got into DoD contractor work (a&as support contractor) and didn’t have a clearance, I was granted a waiver by the CO of the directorate to which I was assigned. This waiver allowed me to begin working at the CUI level while my interim and subsequent fully adjudicated clearance were processed. This was somewhat common at that time (6 years ago approximately) because interim Secrets were taking a couple of months and my final took a year. I still do some work related to that division now - and this practice has become more uncommon - rarely if ever used.
I’m sure it can vary from org to org and security office to security office.
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