U.S. AIRPORTS Official cites lax security in hiring of screeners

At one point the agency was hiring 5,000 screeners a week.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- In a rush to hire workers, the Transportation Security Administration put thousands of screeners at the nation's airports without required background checks, the Homeland Security Department's inspector general said Friday.
Eighty-five of those workers were convicted felons, later fired.
In an interview, inspector general Clark Kent Ervin said more than 18,000 baggage and passenger screeners who had been working for five months or more still had not had fingerprint or other checks as of May 2003. Those checks are required by law.
Ervin said TSA was under a great deal of pressure to hire screeners in order to meet "extremely tight deadlines by Congress." At one point, he said, TSA was hiring about 5,000 screeners a week.
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.
"Screeners were hired, trained, and, in some cases, put to work contrary to sound personnel security practices," said the report, which was released Thursday.
It blamed lax management and oversight by TSA of the contractors the agency hired to perform the checks. In one case, the report said, TSA found more than 500 boxes of unprocessed background check forms for more than 20,000 screeners at the office of a former contractor.
Acknowledges errors
In response, TSA acting administrator David Stone said the agency has acknowledged missteps and taken action to correct them.
"In hearings before Congress that began last June, TSA identified a weakness in the pre-employment background checks that involved less than 2 percent of our employees," Stone said in a statement. "TSA has strengthened the hiring procedures that ensure our airport screeners are second to none."
The agency was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, and charged with taking over the airport screening duties from private companies at 424 commercial airports.
After receiving more than 1.7 million applications, the agency hired more than 55,000 screeners, meeting congressionally mandated deadlines to have the new work force in place by late 2002.
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.