Personnel Security Clearances. An Outcome-Focused Strategy is Needed to Guide Implementation of the Reformed Clearance Process

Since 1997, federal agencies have followed a common set of personnel security investigative standards and adjudicative guidelines for determining whether servicemembers, federal workers, private industry personnel, and others are eligible to receive security clearances. Security clearances are required for access to certain national security information, which is classified at one of three levels: top secret, secret, or confidential. The level of classification denotes the degree of protection required for information and the amount of damage that unauthorized disclosure could reasonably cause to national security. The degrees of expected damage that unauthorized disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause are "exceptionally grave damage" for top secret information, "serious damage" for secret information, and "damage" for confidential information. We have previously reported problems-including significant delays in processing clearances-associated with DOD's security clearance processes, and in 2005, 2007, and again in 2009, we identified not only delays in completing the end-to-end clearance processing but also incomplete investigative and adjudicative reports. More recently, we reported that although the executive branch has met current IRTPA timeliness requirements-under which adjudicative agencies are to make a determination on at least 80 percent of all applications for a security clearance within 120 days, on average, after the date of receipt of the application-executive branch reports to Congress do not capture the full range of time that OPM and DOD took to make clearance determinations.