CBP Considering Security Clearance Recognition for New Hires
CBP is considering several measures to cut down on lengthy hiring times and personnel attrition, including hardship pay for agricultural specialists, special salary rates for interdiction agents, and arranging a reciprocity agreement with the Defense Department to allow service members to enroll clearance-related tasks they’ve completed—such as polygraph tests—as credits toward Customs application criteria, CBP Office of Resources Management Assistant Commissioner Linda Jacksta said during a House Homeland Security Border and Maritime Security Subcommittee hearing April 19.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
As CBP continues to grapple with staffing shortages, the agency is looking to its implementation of the 2015 Border Jobs for Veterans Act as a potential “gamechanger,” and hopes to set up by the end of May reciprocity agreements with DoD for veteran applicants’ medical and physical tests, so they won’t have to go through all phases of CBP’s multifaceted applicant vetting process. Additionally, CBP is standing up hiring hubs across the nation in an effort to reduce overall hiring time by 65 percent, from an average of 18 months to 90 days. Jacksta said CBP has held hiring hubs near several military bases to attract veterans, and plans to hold a hiring hub event in Tucson later this month. The Border Jobs for Veterans Act allows CBP to hire veterans on an expedited basis, and initiates programs to recruit military veterans to work as CBP officers.
While CBP remains optimistic about the initial signs of success that its “targeted recruiting strategy” has shown, application steps such as polygraph tests remain huge deterrents for interested candidates. Jacksta said CBP loses 50 percent of its applicant pool during the entrance exam period. Subcommittee Chairwoman Martha McSally, R-Ariz., said CBP needs to balance its employee vetting procedures with the need to hire more employees. CBP is also currently looking at collections of its agriculture user fees and calculating how much more money it'll need to hire a vacancy of some 723 agricultural specialists, CBP Office of Field Operations Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Wagner told lawmakers.
National Treasury Employees Union National President Tony Reardon, who also testified at the hearing, voiced criticism about what he said is CBP’s failure to use available employee pay flexibilities, such as recruitment awards and special salary rates to incentivize new and existing CBP officers to seek vacant port positions. The agency remains about 800 officers short of the 2,000 funded by Congress in 2014. CBP has instituted involuntary temporary duty assignments at San Ysidro, Calif., port of entry to fill staffing gaps, but such assignments should only be used as last resorts, because they can hurt employee morale, Reardon said.