TSA takes heat for background check miscues

Feb 11, 2004 12:00 PM

The Transportation Security Administration put thousands of screeners in place at the nation's airports without required background checks, Homeland Security Department's Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin says.
Ervin says more than 18,000 baggage and passenger screeners who had been working for five months or more still had not had required fingerprint or other checks as of May 2003. In an internal review, the inspector general's office found that TSA also allowed some screeners to stay on the job for weeks or months after checks turned up criminal convictions.
In one case, Ervin's report says, TSA found more than 500 boxes of unprocessed background check forms for more than 20,000 screeners at the office of a contractor tasked with conducting the background checks.
The agency later fired 1,200 screeners after background checks revealed they had either lied on their applications or had criminal records. The inspector general's report, however, said TSA wrongly fired 169 screeners with clean records.

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