SC and spent convictions?

[malvolio]

I just noticed this response a year later and wow bud, you are a bit of a tight ass. It was the German cop that was saying the knucjkledusters were cool not me. They were souvenirs from Bangkok and I was taking them to my new house in greece to hang them on the wall. I did get my SC clearance after about 3 months. A guy sitting across from me started on the same day. He never got an answer and stayed on contract with the rest of us util the project was cancelled just as the financial crisis was about to happen. Ever couple of weeks he would wonder aloud why he never got his clearance back. As he had a male partner, we all just assumed he got caught in a bath-house once in his past and the security guys were holding onto his file for a laugh.

What you don't know I and a few others worked with the Cabinet Office on the whole issue of clearance from contractors and trying to make them see what a balls-up they were making of it. If you look up the CO guidance on hiring into SC-level roles, that is largely our work. Shame there is no way to make the agencies apply them....

That aside, You will never know why clearance is being withheld. One colleague of mine discovered after nearly a year that his ex-wife had a badly overdrawn Credit Card in his name; paid that off and clearance appeared a few days later. Another would never get cleared, since he was a product of the old Irish orphanage system so didn't have a birth certificate. Another guy wrote the software that drove MOD firewalls despite both his parents being KGB workers and him having Lithuanian citizenship; in his case, he could develop the software, but never got anywhere near seeing the data he was protecting.

It's mare's nest. People keep asking what look like simple questions, which is fair enough. Sadly, there are no simple answers.