Federal agency charged with security checks has been urged to improve standards Since 2007, 21 investigators and record checkers who work on security clearances for OPM have been convicted of or pleaded guilty to falsifying their reports by recording fake answers to questions and claiming to have done record checks that never occurred, among other actions. The staff and contractors involved compromised the integrity of at least 240 security checks for federal applicants and current employees, including 203 top-secret clearance investigations, according to the OPM's office of inspector general. "There is an alarmingly insufficient level of oversight of the Federal Investigative Services program," Patrick McFarland, the agency's inspector general, said at a Senate hearing in June. The lack of independent verification of the organization that conducts these important background investigations is a clear threat to national security. McFarland said he believes there may be "considerably more" fraud in the investigative process. "I don't believe we've caught it all by any stretch," he said. Separately, the Government Accountability Office has documented gaping holes in OPM's investigative files. In May 2009, the GAO found that 87 percent of about 3,500 investigative reports the Defense Department used in security clearance decisions were missing required documentation. It urged the office to better measure how often its reports met federal investigative standards. OPM has yet to take that step, Brenda Farrell, the GAO's director of defense capabilities and management, said in an interview. "We have been on record for some time that there is a need for performance measures for these investigative files to help manage and oversee what is going on," she said. We have had discussions, we've asked for documentation and we have not seen any evidence they have done that. OPM officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday. But in his testimony at the June Senate hearing, Merton Miller, associate director of investigations for OPM's Federal Investigative Services, defended his agency's work. "We have no backlogs, are meeting timeliness mandates and have increased automation," Miller said. "We've got quality procedures in our contracts for our contractors, as well as our federal employees, where there are several stages and several layers of review that occur when a background investigation is being worked and when it is finalized," he added. Miller said missing pieces of information in case files were sometimes the result of a lack of cooperation by an applicant's past employers or an inability to interview subjects because they were deployed abroad.