The Federal Protective Service is tasked with protecting about 9,000 federal facilities with about 1,200 full time employees and a budget of $1 billion, but weaknesses in its contact security guard program continue to hamper its mission, GAO told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee recently.
After conducting site visits, interviewing officials, guards and contractors, and undertaking convert testing, GAO concluded that FPS does not fully ensure that its contract security guards have the training and certifications required to work a federal facility.
It said FPS requires that all prospective guards complete about 128 hours of training including 8 hours of x-ray and magnetometer training, but that in one region, FPS has not provided the x-ray or magnetometer training to its 1,500 guards since 2004.
Insufficient training may have contributed to negligent conduct — for example, sending an infant through an xray machine — and FPS does not have a fully reliable system for monitoring and verifying guard training and certification requirements, according to GAO.
After reviewing 663 randomly selected guard records it found that 62 percent of the guards had at least one expired certification.
GAO said FPS has limited assurance that its guards are complying with post orders and it lacks specific national guidance on when and how guard inspections should be performed. On one rare nighttime inspection, FPS found a guard zonked out on Percocet at his post.
Perhaps most alarming, according to GAO-09-859T, GAO succeeded in getting the components for an improvised explosive device into all 10 level IV federal facilities that it tested.
