Contractors will give temporary or probationary clearances to new hires who have a recent record of a clearance (such as from military service a year or two prior) with no conviction record on file since the last clearance held, or had a clearance on their last job.
They are then required to begin a re-verification of clearance process - which can take anywhere from three months to a year, and around $5 to $10K per request - for the official clearance level recognized by the DoD.
If the company does not have deep pockets to invest in new hires, someone who should not have a clearance, lies about their other qualifications, or is a security risk can work for up to a year in any one job before they will get caught. Lying about qualifications in service jobs, especially technical and management is not uncommon; I've known several people who are experiance-based professionals or can otherwise do the job exaggerate or outright lie about their prior job or education records to get the job they have - and that can sink a clearance investigation right there.
It's very possible that a sub-contractor, especially someone who hires from labor services, can be stuck with such a liar or other security risk for a long time.
I've seen where both "good" workers who made a legal mistake (mostly substance abuse or financial issues) and unstable workers who were still making legal mistakes used to be able to ride an earlier clearance (often for a trivial job such as security guard or janitor) to access a secure DoD site for near a decade - jumping from project to project, small employer to small employer, until they were actually forced to go through the official re-issuance investigation for Secret or Top Secret to keep working.
Even then, if they could talk very quickly and had a good field rep, they could possibly continue to get jobs that required a clearance in a small, shoe-string operations that didn't look too closely and weren't likely to get audited.
Of course, with electronic records and the internet, this sort of "job jumping" is getting harder to get away with. But someone could still potentially get a job requiring a clearance in a probationary status for six months to a year before going through an official investigation if there is no flag indicating a previous clearance had been pulled for cause, or if they did not have an official criminal record.
Haele
= new reply since forum marked as read
