WASHINGTON — An IT system prototype constructed by Perspecta to handle mass quantities of safety clearance background checks will transition to manufacturing underneath an different transaction settlement from the Pentagon’s background investigation company.
The manufacturing settlement, utilizing the Pentagon’s different transaction authority with much less inflexible aggressive contract necessities for some know-how improvement initiatives, is price about $474 million over 5 years, the Protection Counterintelligence and Safety Company estimated in its announcement Could 14. The company is constructing its capability to handle about 95 p.c of the federal authorities’s background investigations. That job is made tougher by the federal government’s big backlog of checks which have slowed the safety clearance course of.
The award, with a one-year base and 4 one-year choices, follows the completion of a prototype course of that began in 2019, by which Perspecta developed an enterprise IT system and knowledge analytics functionality for the company.
The manufacturing OTA will proceed Perspecta’s work on growing and working the prototype as a part of a complete IT system DCSA makes use of to handle background checks and safety clearance investigations for federal workers and contractors, the announcement acknowledged.
Protection IT contractor Peraton Inc. purchased Perspecta earlier this 12 months for greater than $7 billion.
DCSA grew to become the federal authorities’s major background investigator in 2019 when an govt order from then-President Donald Trump transferred the authority from the Workplace of Personnel Administration to the Pentagon.
The federal authorities’s safety clearance backlog sat at 188,000 instances as of Could 2020, based on a report from DCSA final June. That quantity was down from a peak of 725,000 lively investigations in April 2018.