Screening of Personnel Security Investigations.

Abstract : With the downsizing of the military departments, there is increasing pressure to reduce costs and eliminate non-value added and redundant activities. In the personnel security arena, this has translated into the adoption of a risk management philosophy. The cost of personnel security procedures must be balanced against the degree to which they reduce risk. The focus of this paper is empirically to examine whether the screening of personnel security investigations by the Defense Investigative Service (DIS) makes sense from a risk management perspective. Under the current system, the Department of Defense (DoD) military departments and agencies forward a request for a background investigation to DIS. All investigative requirements are completed, a case analyst reviews the case to ensure that it is complete, and then the case is forwarded to the cognizant DoD facility for adjudication. There is potential for reducing the time and cost of clearance processing by having DIS screen favorable cases for the adjudication facilities. This could eliminate the duplication of effort associated with the current practice of having adjudicative personnel review cases which DIS case analysts have previously identified as clean or having minor derogatory information that would not affect the granting of a security clearance. There was, however, no definitive information available related to the potential cost savings of having DIS screen cases or the possible negative impacts of such screening on the adjudicative process. The primary aim of this study was to examine, from a risk management perspective, the feasibility of having DIS screen favorable cases. Of interest was whether the potential cost avoidance derived from a screening program would be outweighed by possible negative impacts on the personnel security determination process.