Personnel Management Office Will Take Over Defense Dept. Security Clearances In a long-delayed move to speed up processing of security clearances, the Office of Personnel Management will soon absorb the Defense Security Service, consolidating the vast majority of clearance investigations in a single agency. In an announcement Nov. 22, OPM said 1,800 DSS investigators and supervisors have been trained on its IT systems and will be transferred to OPM in February. The DSS personnel will remain in their current offices, including 20 field offices around the country. Congress authorized the transfer more than a year ago, but OPM officials said it was delayed by issues of cost and by the need to train DSS employees. With increased demand for cleared employees for defense and homeland security work, contractors and federal agencies have complained of long waits for clearances. Contractors are paying premiums for employees with active clearances and some companies are advertising on Washington radio stations for cleared workers. The General Accounting Office found it took more than a year to get a clearance from the Defense Department. Various authorities estimate the size of the backlog of pending applications at from 500,000 to 750,000, counting both contractors and government employees. OPM, which handles clearance investigations for most civilian agencies, contracts out its investigative work. Congress authorized the agency to consider whether to hire contractors for the defense investigations one year after the transfer. OPM awarded new blanket purchase agreements in July to five companies to process clearance applications. It said the contractors would increase the number of investigators to 8,000 from the current 6,000 over the next three years. But a spokesman for one of the contractors said it would take many months to train the new investigators. (SAA, 8/27) The contractors are Mantech MSM, CACI-PTI, Kroll Inc., Omniplex World Services Corp., and Systems Application and Technologies Inc. OPM’s Center for Federal Investigative Services in Boyers, PA, manages the contracts.