Letters

TSA Wins, Not Woes

Brian Friel's article about our company's efforts to help the Transportation Security Administration recruit and hire airport security screeners would have been more complete had he checked with us to clarify several assertions ("Human Resources: Outsource With Care," Managing

The article implies we did not accurately process personnel information. That is incorrect. We processed records according to TSA directives and entered information into a Transportation Department legacy system, CPMIS, which TSA chose to use. When our work was completed on the contract at the end of December and we needed to transfer work to the new contractors, we followed a TSA hand-off plan, inventoried all data in hand and identified the next steps in the ongoing processing of each item.

The article also would have benefited from some context about why the contract increased from $103 million to $700 million. First, the scope of the work changed after the contract was awarded. Rather than hiring 30,000 airport screeners, the agency ended up hiring 64,000 airport screeners, airport baggage scanning personnel, federal security directors and field management staff. The assessment process, originally conceived to be done at existing facilities, was changed to a different model that required setting up 150 temporary full-service assessment centers across the United States. All of this was done in a compressed timeframe of 10 months and met Congress' deadline.