At a June 18, 2014 hearing before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs entitled “The Intelligence Community: Monitoring Its Contracting Workforce,” Senator Tom Carper, Chair of the Committee, stated in his opening remarks that “an agency that assigns too much responsibility to contractors risks undermining itself and creating a weaker organization.” The report also states that independent contractors working for the CIA`s counterterrorism center “assume a surveillance role,” a task that should be performed by CIA personnel, and another case in which the CIA violated federal law. The OIG said it reviewed an unknown number of independent contractor contracts and engagements during FY2010 (the exact number had been redacted from the audit report) and investigated whether the CIA complied with federal laws and regulations when outsourcing its work. The Office of the Inspector General noted that the CIA had not done so. Finally, ig concluded that the CIA had not sufficiently documented the reasonableness of the prices paid for the services of independent contractors. As a result, the CIA could pay independent contractors — many of whom are former CIA employees — more for their services than it should. The CIA offers direct employment through its Career Portal; However, the agency often works with audited U.S. private security companies. These strategic partnerships are necessary because of the varying degrees and depths of skills, education and experience to successfully deliver certain types of jobs. But after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, when there was a sudden rush of staff, officials turned to people they knew and could quickly hire as contractors. Hayden also banned employees from resigning within 12 months and then returning to work at the CIA as higher-paid contractors. “Some of his best people came out because there was a program that allowed them to come back the next day,” said Jack Devine, former deputy director of operations at the CIA. Panetta, the current CIA director, has promised to continue Hayden`s efforts to reduce the role of contracts with the CIA.
“I truly believe that we have a responsibility to take on many of these tasks internally and to develop the expertise and skills within the CIA to fulfill these responsibilities,” he said at a congressional hearing earlier this year. “I`m very nervous when I rely on external contractors to do this work.” The report goes on to say that the employment contracts were awarded to independent contractors without the need to perform specific tasks. “Instead, almost all of the task assignments we reviewed simply indicated that [independent contractors] are required to provide `operational support` to a particular [CIA] station or base,” the report says. The CIA violated federal laws and its own internal regulations by hiring independent contractors for a variety of intelligence and national security work to be performed by government employees, according to an audit report by the CIA`s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) obtained by VICE News in response to a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. “The CIA relies heavily on [independent contractors] to fulfill important aspects of its mission,” the report says. However, the extent of this dependency is difficult to determine because all dollar amounts and other numerical data have been changed. The report states that “the number of contractual measures [National Clandestine Service] increased by 55% between the 2008 and 2010 financial years”. In many cases, contractors began performing work even before they received a contract or work order, a practice that the OIG says “must stop.” The exact number of independent contractors working for the CIA at the time of the OIG`s review was redacted from the audit report, as was the monetary value of their contracts. One of the conclusions of the OIG audit was that the CIA could not back up its claims with documentary evidence that the money the agency spends to outsource its work is fair and reasonable.
Yet in 2008, contractors made up 27 percent of the workforce in a U.S. intelligence community that had more than 100,000 workers. This heavy reliance on the private sector has led to criticism of the high financial costs as well as the potential lack of accountability of private companies. Contracting officers are hired at different levels of experience, from entry to full performance position. You will gradually gain more on-the-job experience and related training and development programs that will allow you to achieve your career goals while meeting the needs of the mission. Hiring contract staff makes a bureaucratic sense. This allows the CIA to increase its workforce at a lower cost because contract employees do not receive the health insurance or pension benefits to which regular employees are entitled. It also gives the agency the flexibility to hire specialists for aerial surveillance in the Amazon jungle without having to keep them after the mission ends.
The CIA does not publish a number of its full-time or contract employees, but hiring contractors has been a widespread practice for a long time. These temporary workers are often in the field, particularly in drug trafficking monitoring programs abroad. But a contractor could be hired for more mundane work, such as providing foreign language translations at headquarters. Contractors can be described in detail to work for the CIA from other organizations – for example, employees of a company that has a contract with the agency to carry out surveillance work. During his tenure at the CIA from 2006 to 2009, Hayden reduced the agency`s number of contractors by 15 percent and worked to replace contractors employed in the CIA`s most central missions with government employees. “The agency could also lose control of the activities and decisions that should be the responsibility of the government, not the contractors,” Carper said. Second, the use of contractors for business-critical work creates an additional layer of management between the contractor`s employees and the government. The addition of layers makes it difficult to monitor and assign responsibilities.
And third, if organizations turn to contractors as a “default option” without careful analysis, they run the risk of paying more to do the work than they would have paid if they had relied solely on federal employees. The report states that the CIA “relies heavily on independent contractors to fulfill key aspects of its mission,” particularly in the Clandestine National Service, the agency`s secret branch responsible for covert operations around the world. The report, which was published on the 22nd. June 2012, but only published last month, raised numerous red flags over the CIA`s use of independent contractors in all departments of the agency and for work done in areas that included covert operations and protective security services abroad. Contractors are expected to undergo security treatment similar to that required by regular CIA employees. And like CIA employees, they should only know what they need to know what they`re working on. Although the CIA has acknowledged the role of its contractors in the Peruvian mission disaster, it generally does not comment on whether a person – whether a contractor or a regular employee – is affiliated with the agency. Normally, entrepreneurs shouldn`t reveal their connection either. If someone is a CIA contract employee looking for drug traffickers in South America, it`s not considered a good idea to disclose that fact — especially if the agency doesn`t offer health insurance. More than half of the agency`s employees have been hired since 9/11. This might suggest why we are quite willing to hire retirees as entrepreneurs to come back and try to make up for this imbalance. The heavily redacted report concludes that the CIA violated federal laws and regulations by improperly hiring and employing independent contractors and failing to adequately document the cost of its services.
(The report distinguishes between independent contractors who are self-employed and industrial entrepreneurs, who are similar corporations or businesses and their employees.) The OIG report highlighted two of the CIA`s offices for hiring independent contractors to perform tasks that should have been performed by federal employees — the Clandestine National Service and the CIA`s Human Resources and Recruitment Center. The report states that the latter have contracts with a redacted number of independent contractors, “in part to conduct telephone and face-to-face interviews with job applicants under the [National Clandestine Service] Professional Trainee (PT) and Clandestine Service Trainee (CST) program that does not comply with applicable federal laws” or CIA internal regulations. The federal law explicitly prohibits “the use of contractors for the `selection or non-selection of persons for employment in the federal government, including the interviewing of persons for employment`.” Tim Shorrock, author of the book Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, said the report makes it clear that the Clandestine National Service appears to be “almost unrestrained” when it comes to hiring independent contractors.