Justice Department joins lawsuit against USIS over background checks
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Version 0 of 7. The Justice Department has joined a whistleblowers’ lawsuit against the company that conducts 45 percent of the security background checks for potential U.S. government hires, and is accusing the firm of submitting more than 660,000 flawed investigations of individuals during a four-year period. The filing in U.S. District Court in Alabama on Wednesday was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. It accuses Falls Church-based USIS of sending incomplete background reviews in about 40 percent of the cases it handled, the Journal said. “Beginning in at least March 2008 and continued through at least September 2012, USIS management devised and executed a scheme to deliberately circumvent contractually required quality reviews of completed background investigations in order to increase the company’s revenues and profits,” the Justice Department said in its complaint. The cases were incomplete because they had not undergone a “quality review,” the government said. USIS conducted background checks for both former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and government contractor Aaron Alexis, who shot and killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard last fall. There is no evidence that those probes were among the ones that the company is accused of submitting prematurely, the Journal reported. The federal government gave USIS nearly $12 million in bonus payments in fiscal years 2008, 2009 and 2010 as a reward for good performance, the complaint filed on Wednesday says. Had the office of Personnel Management been aware that many of the background checks were incomplete, the Justice Department said in its filing, “it would not have awarded USIS the bonuses above because it would not have deemed USIS’s performance acceptable.” The lawsuit that the government is joining was originally filed by Blake Percival, a former director of fieldwork services at USIS. He sued the company in 2011 under the whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act, accusing the company of rushing cases through the system and hiding the practice from the Office of Personnel Management. The Justice Department accused USIS of wrongdoing in October, when it “intervened” in the lawsuit. The decision to join the lawsuit marks an escalation and increases the legal pressure on USIS, which is also the subject of a criminal investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District. |