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Justice Department says USIS submitted 665,000 incomplete background checks
January 28, 2014 posted by Steve Brownstein
Lawmakers said that new details emerging from the Justice Department’s civil case against a leading company that conducts security background checks for the federal government may speed legislation designed to clean up the once-burgeoning contracting business.
The Justice Department filed a new complaint in a whistleblowers’ lawsuit it joined in October against USIS, a company that conducts background checks for nearly half of potential U.S. government hires.
The filing accuses the Falls Church, Va., firm of taking shortcuts in about 40 percent of the cases it handled — at least 665,000 in total — and, in the process, qualifying for nearly $12 million in performance bonuses from the federal government. Yet USIS officials told the government that all the necessary reviews had been done.
“Flushed everything like a dead goldfish,” one USIS manager wrote in one of several e-mails cited in the court filing about how cases were being sped along to meet revenue targets.
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), who co-sponsored legislation aimed at reforming the security clearance process, issued a statement Thursday critical of the “stunning failures of this company — and the resulting threats to our national security.”
McCaskill, a member of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, has introduced legislation with Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) that would improve oversight of the security-clearance process, providing more funds for auditing and investigating contractors. A version of the legislation has passed the House, and a final vote is pending in the Senate.
The Justice Department said in the complaint that USIS knowingly conducted flawed investigations of individuals seeking security clearances.
“Beginning in at least March 2008 and continuing through at least September 2012, USIS management devised and executed a scheme to deliberately circumvent contractually required quality reviews of completed background investigations in order to increase the company’s revenues and profits,” the Justice Department said in a filing Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Alabama.
The background reviews were incomplete because they had not undergone a promised “quality review,” the government said.
USIS said in a statement that the allegations did not fit the company’s record or approach.
