The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is inconsistent in how it vets contractor employees, adding cost to industry and creating inefficiencies, lawmakers and industry officials said on Tuesday.
Different DHS components apply federal “fitness standards” for contractors differently, which “causes difficulties as many contractor employees provide services for multiple DHS components,” Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Oversight and Management Efficiency Subcommittee, said at the outset of a hearing. “I am concerned that DHS’ process to vet the character and conduct of contractor employees, known as a fitness determination, is bureaucratic in the worst ways: inefficient, inconsistent, and lacks transparency.”
Rep. Luis Correa (D-Calif.), the ranking member on the panel, also highlighted the inconsistent application of fitness standards across DHS and said companies have also “indicated DHS is not transparent with its fitness criteria, hindering firms’ ability to understand the personnel needs of DHS components.”
Charles Allen, a former under secretary for Intelligence and Analysis at DHS, told the panel that the inconsistent and inefficient application of contractor fitness standards across the department “deters” some companies from working at DHS, makes it difficult to execute on contracts, and adds costs to companies, and “ultimately undermines DHS’ mission.”
Allen is currently the Senior Intelligence Advisor for the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. He recommends that DHS standardize its contractor fitness requirements and eliminate the requirements for contractor personnel that already have a “valid, in-scope security clearance.”
Brandon LaBonte, CEO and owner of a small management consulting firm, ArdentMC, said DHS components should accept the fitness determinations of sister components, noting that his company hired an employee in November 2015 that had three years of client support for DHS yet it took 16 months to get a new fitness approval to work with a different customer within the department. The employee took a different job in the meantime, he said.
LaBonte also said that DHS should work more closely with industry on the process for fitness determinations and leverage industry’s government-approved security officers to help in the security process.