Lie Detectors Trip Applicants at Border Agency

Описание: (13 Jan 2017)
David Kirk was a career Marine pilot with a top-secret security clearance and a record of flying classified missions. He was in the cockpit when President George W. Bush and Vice Presidents Dick Cheney and Joe Biden travelled around the nation's capital by helicopter.
With credentials like that, Kirk was stunned to fail a lie detector when he applied for a pilot's job with US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which guards approximately 6,000 miles (nearly 10-thousand kilometres) of border with Mexico and Canada.
After two contentious polygraph sessions that lasted a combined eight hours, Kirk said, he drove home wondering how things had gone so wrong.
Two out of three applicants to the CBP fail its polygraph, according to the agency - more than double the average rate of eight law enforcement agencies that provided data to The Associated Press under open-records requests.
It is a big reason approximately 2,000 jobs at the nation's largest law enforcement agency are empty, with the Border Patrol, a part of CBP, recently slipping below 20-thousand agents for the first time since 2009. And it has raised questions of whether the lie detector tests are being properly administered.
In December, the Homeland Security Department's inspector general said it was reviewing whether CBP's polygraphs are effective in hiring. The hiring difficulties have become so acute that the Border Patrol recently took the unusual step of asking Congress to use money earmarked for 300 jobs for other purposes. That raises doubts about President-elect Donald Trump's pledge to add 5,000 agents.
Taking a polygraph became a hiring requirement at CBP in 2012 after a huge hiring surge led to more agents getting arrested for misconduct.
James Tomsheck helped design and implement the agency's polygraph program when he was the former chief of internal affairs from 2006-2014.
He and the current CPB Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske said the failure rate is too high, but that it is largely because the agency has not attracted the applicants it wants.

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