Unpaid tax debts surprisingly frequent among those with U.S. security clearances

Anyone who applies for a federal security clearance has some tough questions to answer. The questionnaire is 120 pages long, and among its demands is whether an applicant has any financial problems that might create a security vulnerability. Did the applicant file tax returns and make required payments? Does he or she have any tax debts?

More than 3 million Defense Department employees and contractors have filled out the questionnaire. But surprisingly, about 26,000 of them managed to get high-level clearances while having unpaid taxes, the Government Accountability Office reported on July 28. The grand total of these delinquent sums is about $229 million.

Lying on the questionaire is a felony that carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison. So if all the applicants told the truth, then the officials who granted the clearances decided they did not care about tax delinquencies. That’s despite periodic betrayals by the likes of Aldrich Ames, a notorious CIA official who traded secrets to the Soviet Union for cash that he used to cover his debts.

“It is astonishing that there were so many cleared persons who owe so much”, said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, and an expert on classification issues. “One would expect the security clearance population to be more law abiding on average than the general public.”

GAO was able to prepare its estimate by matching Social Security numbers from the IRS Unpaid Assessment database with Defense’s database of security clearances, the Joint Personnel Adjudication System.

But the IRS is ordinarily legally constrained when it comes to sharing taxpayer information with other agencies, even with those reviewing security clearance applications. GAO previously recommended that reviewers check applications against a different database, known as the Treasury Offset Program, which helps agencies subtract delinquent debts from federal salaries and similar payments. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which has jurisdiction over clearances, studied that possibility, along with the IRS and the Office of Personnel Management, but the agencies dismissed the idea for “legal and logistical challenges,” according to the GAO report, which did not provide specifics.

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Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.