WaPo reported on the USIS whistleblower settlement. USIS had been owned by a series of private equity underwriters (PEU) since President Bill Clinton privatized government security investigations in the late 1990's' The story stated::
665,000 cases had been dumped between 2008 and 2012. Internal documents “confirmed that USIS senior management was aware of and directed the dumping practices,” it asserted. The alleged motive was simple greed: “This practice was followed in order to meet USIS’s internal goals for completed cases and, therefore, to increase the company’s revenue and profits.”PEU sponsored, PEU imploded.
The lawsuit cited emails from executives detailing the alleged practice, such as the one that proclaimed: “Shelves are clean as they could get. Flushed everything like a dead goldfish.”
And it documented how USIS raked in bonuses for turning around the cases quickly: $11.7 million between 2008 and 2010. A subsequent congressional investigation found that OPM seemed to be aware of the practice, and in 2011 staff members sent a letter to USIS’s vice president of field operation, asking him to explain how four investigators could have completed more than 13,000 reports — an average of 3,278 cases per employee — in one week.Quality matters not when the federal budget is a tool to push money to friends and political sponsors.
At the time, USIS said the allegations did not reflect its core values.
