THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The federal government is joining in with an ex-employee of one of the vetting contractors in suing the company for fraudulent services.

The Justice Department said on Wednesday that it has joined an ex-employee’s fraud suit against the same contractor that performed background checks on NSA leaker Edward Snowden and on Aaron Alexis, the gunman who killed 12 people at Washington’s Navy Yard on Sept. 16th.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Alabama by a former employee, alleges that the United States Investigations Service, LLC failed to perform quality control reviews in determining whether information gathering on the backgrounds of other applicants – not Snowden or Alexis -- was sufficiently thorough.

In numerous instances beginning in 2008, it alleges, the company sought to maximize profits by engaging in a practice called “dumping,” in which incomplete reviews were forwarded to the Office of Personnel Management for decisions on clearances.

USIS, based in Falls Church, Va., easily leads the industry, saying that its 6,500 employees conducted 700,000investigations for federal agencies in 2012, most of them presumably into the backgrounds of applicants for sensitive federal jobs.

OPM hasn’t pointed to any deficiencies in the files that the company submitted after separately examining Snowden’s and Alexis’ pasts, and stated that Alexis’ 2007 review was “complete and in compliance with all investigative standards.” But the fact that both men got clearances has set off multiple investigations and calls for an overhaul of the process.

“We will not tolerate shortcuts taken by companies that we have entrusted with vetting individuals to be given access to our country’s sensitive and secret information,” said Stuart Delery, chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, who signed off on the suit.

The feds may not know just where the defendant went wrong but having been burned twice by the same company, the are gonna get medieval on their asses. But there is no evidence, as yet, that they have cancelled the contract.