"DOJ accuses firm that vetted Snowden of faking 665,000 background checks"

DOJ accuses firm that vetted Snowden of faking 665,000 background checks

By Michael Isikoff at NBC News

http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2014/01/23/22401812-doj-accuses-firm-that-vetted-snowden-of-faking-665000-background-checks?lite

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As Edward Snowden prepares to defend himself in a worldwide webinar Thursday, the Justice Department is accusing the private contractor that vetted him and thousands of other intelligence workers of bilking U.S. taxpayers out of tens of millions of dollars by conducting phony background checks.

USIS, the giant private contractor that conducted the background checks of both Snowden and Washington Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis, is accused in a Justice Department lawsuit filed Wednesday night of conducting 665,000 fake background checks between 2008 and 2012.

“USIS management devised and executed a scheme to deliberately circumvent contractually required quality reviews of completed background investigations in order to increase the company’s revenues and profits,” said the Justice Department in its complaint, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Alabama.

The DOJ lawsuit cites internal emails to back up charges that USIS senior officials devised a wide-ranging "scheme" to defraud the federal government on background checks through a practice known as "dumping" or "flushing" in order to boost the firm's profits.





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