Dead Among Those Interviewed in Faulty Background Checks
By Chris Strohm and Nick Taborek - Jul 8, 2013
Anthony J. Domico, a former contractor hired to check the backgrounds of U.S. government workers, filed a 2006 report with the results of an investigation.
There was one snag: A person he claimed to have interviewed had been dead for more than a decade. Domico, who had worked for contractors CACI International Inc. (CACI) and Systems Application & Technologies Inc., found himself the subject of a federal probe.
Domico is among 20 investigators who have pleaded guilty or have been convicted of falsifying such reports since 2006. Half of them worked for companies such as Altegrity Inc., which performed a background check on national-security contractor Edward Snowden. The cases may represent a fraction of the fabrications in a government vetting process with little oversight, according to lawmakers and U.S. watchdog officials.
“The process for granting security clearances across the federal government is broken,” Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the top Republican on a Senate panel overseeing government contracting, said in an e-mail.
Passing a government background check is a requirement before an employee or contractor can be granted a security clearance to access classified information. The process has been under increasing scrutiny since Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who had worked for McLean, Virginia-based Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp. (BAH), leaked secret documents on U.S. surveillance programs.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-08/dead-among-those-interviewed-in-faulty-background-checks.html