Estimated Impact of the Proposed Automated Continuing Evaluation System (ACES) on Personnel Security Effectiveness: A Preliminary Feasibility Assessment.

摘要

A retrospective design was employed in this study to estimate the number of full-scale reinvestigations that would have been triggered under the proposed Automated Continuing Evaluation System (ACES) in 11,065 Office of Personnel Management periodic reinvestigation cases for people holding high level Federal security clearances. An assessment was also made of the number of serious issue cases identified under the present system that would have been missed by ACES. Under the present system, full-scale reinvestigations are required to be conducted on all personnel holding high-level clearances who have not been investigated for five years. Under ACES, computerized security-related information (e.g., criminal history, foreign travel, and credit database files) would be regularly checked. Full-scale reinvestigations in individual cases could be triggered any time or may never be initiated based upon the results of the electronic checks, as well as consideration of other risk-management factors. The results indicate that ACES is likely to detect more serious issue cases than the present system, because they are currently being missed whenever people having them quit before their periodic reinvestigations are initiated. It appears the ACES approach would also detect serious issue cases sooner and at less cost than the current periodic reinvestigation approach.