Industry’s asking DCSA for something reasonable: show us the data. Continuous vetting was supposed to make clearance management faster and smarter—automated alerts instead of periodic reinvestigations every five or ten years. The shift has helped cut the backlog for initial investigations, which matters when you’re trying to get new hires billable. But now that CV alerts are live at scale, contractors are running into a different problem: some of those alerts take too long to resolve, and people get stuck in limbo between programs or contracts.
At a recent NISPPAC meeting, ManTech’s LaToya Coleman pressed the point—if there’s an open CV case, the processing stops. Without metrics or projected timelines, FSOs can’t plan, and candidates can’t move. DCSA acknowledged the feedback and said they’re working to gather better data on alert resolution. Fair enough. But the scale here is real: DoE flagged over 500,000 alerts in a single quarter, and DHS processed a similar volume with a 13-day average adjudication. Most of those alerts turned out to be low-risk noise, which is exactly what triage is supposed to filter out.
The underlying tension isn’t new. CV is a better model than what it replaced, but any system that runs on automated flags will generate false positives and edge cases that need human judgment. The ask from industry isn’t to slow down the transition—it’s to get visibility into how long resolution actually takes and to loop FSOs into the process earlier. If DCSA can surface that data and tighten the feedback loop, CV will work the way it’s supposed to. If not, we’ll keep hearing about cleared talent sitting on the bench while alerts get worked.