Go to Original
Passport Backlog Put Data More in Hands of Contractors
By Glenn Kessler
The Washington Post
Tuesday 25 March 2008
The contract employees who snooped into the passport files of two presidential
candidates this year were part of a private workforce that has increasingly
assumed responsibility for processing the sensitive documents, State Department
and industry officials said yesterday.
The department began farming out the work to private firms nearly two decades
ago, but the ratio of contractors to government employees exploded in the past
year when passport applications suddenly began to overwhelm the State Department.
From 2001 to 2007, 40 to 45 percent of the workers handling passports were
contractors, but now 60 percent of the 4,400 passport employees work for private
firms, State Department officials said yesterday.
Three of those contract workers were discovered last week to have peeked at
the private passport files of Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.).
A State Department trainee last summer also looked at the file of Sen. Hillary
Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). The workers are a small part of an army of contractors
that has helped keep the official federal workforce flat at about 1.9 million
workers for years. The number topped 7.6 million in 2005 - the most recent
year for which figures are available - an increase of 2.4 million over 2002,
according to Paul C. Light of New York University, who compiles the most authoritative
survey of government contract employees.
Light said that about two-thirds of those contract workers are service employees
- people who answer phones, input data or handle customer inquiries - who
work side by side with federal employees. "They sit at the same desks but
do not have the same benefits," he said.
Stanley Inc. of Arlington, one of the State Department contractors involved,
said that two subcontractor employees who snooped at Obama's file in January
and February were fired the day the firm discovered what they had done. "You
can't fire a federal employee that quickly," Light noted.
Stanley supervisors oversaw the subcontractors; State Department officials
managed the Stanley supervisors.
The State Department's policy is that only "inherently government functions"
must be handled by federal employees, a senior State Department official said.
Thus the clerk who accepts a passport application, the person who scans the
documents into the computer and the person who prints the book are all contractors;
the people who review the documentation and approve or deny the application
are federal employees, as are the overall supervisors of the scanners and printers.
For Stanley, the booming business has been highly profitable, especially since
the government began requiring passports for travel to Canada and Mexico. "Passport
services revenue grew 61 percent from the third quarter of last fiscal year,"
Chief Financial Officer Brian J. Clark told Wall Street analysts in January,
accounting for 14 percent of the company's total revenue. Stanley recently branched
out into processing visas and immigration petitions for foreigners seeking to
come to the United States.
A third contract employee - who looked at Obama's and McCain's files - worked
for the Analysis Corp. of McLean. The company does not process passports but
instead staffs an after-hours operations center for State, handling queries
from border crossings and overseas inquiries about passports or visas that may
appear suspicious. That employee has been suspended from handling such data
pending an investigation.
All three were caught because they accessed files secretly flagged as belonging
to a high-profile person, triggering a notice to a supervisor. The State Department
declined to disclose how many such files have been flagged, saying it would
undermine the detection program.
"It is not a handful, but it's not thousands," said the senior official,
speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak
publicly. He added that the criteria for inclusion on the list are being reviewed.
-------
Jump to today's Truthout Features:
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. t r u t h o u t has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is t r u t h o u t endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
"Go to Original" links are provided as a convenience to our readers and allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted on TO may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the "Go to Original" links.
Print This Story
E-mail This Story