FBI Clearance

I am from Frederick County Maryland and I had to get a clearance. I don't remember exactly how long it took (that was over a year ago), but I do remember that it was the longest part of all the paperwork.

I'm not from Maryland, but I thougth I'd share our system with you. For our homestudy, we would need the California State Department clearance (departmemt of Justice) and the INS would do the FBI clearance. It's strange that the FBI clearance would be needed for a homestudy, but you know, it makes more sense than having to do two separate ones for us! Hope you find your answer.

We are in Maryland and we were required to have a FBI clearance done. That is state law. Anyone who will be caring for children is supposed to have one. As for how long it takes it depends on whether or not you've ever had one before. If not it can take up to 10 weeks. If you have, it usually takes around 4-6 weeks. Both my husband and me had them done so we got our state clearances back in two weeks and FBI in 4 weeks. Hope that helps some.

I am in Baltimore County and we had to have an FBI clearance done as well. Our social worker told us to get that paperwork done first so they can get that started while we work on the rest of the paperwork.

We had to get an FBI clearance here in AZ and that was what we were told to get done first was the fingerprinting. We were told it could take up to 5 months but ours was done in about 10 weeks. It was part of us being certified to adopt.

Thanks everyone for responding. I'm not very happy to hear that it may take another 4-6 weeks but I have a shread of hope. I had a security clearance over 20 years ago. Oh please, oh please let that speed up my process now. It's been over six weeks already. This was one of the first things that we started back in January. Unfortunately, my fingerprints weren't good enough and I had to be reprinted so I lost a lot of time. Thanks again. Jeannine

For anyone who still has to get them done or needs to have them redone: In the state of Maryland if you go to CJIS which is in Reistertown They will do them and you guaranteed to walk away with fingerprints that our done right. (A bonus is they're inkless) PLus you save the postage fees as they send them from there. That's another reason why our's came back so quickly.

I would like to second what Holly said about going to Reisterstown. It was highly recommended by our agency but it seemed so far away. We went to a friend who teaches people how to do fingerprints at the postal academy. We figured we were safe since this was a TEACHER and several of our friends who adopted went this route. Well, both of my sets of prints failed. I ended up driving up to Reisterstown TWICE, once for each set of prints that failed. Now, I am a month or more behind because I wanted to save a few hours of my time. Boy, do I regret it! Jeannine PS - They did ink my tricky fingers so you aren't guaranteed inkless.

I'm really surprised that they inked you. The lady that did mine messed up my pinkie three times before she got it right. The funny thing was when she was done she looked at me and said I can already tell these are going to come back negative. You obviously have never been fingerprinted before. I just started to laugh and then let her know that I actually had been finger printed a total of 6 times for my previous jobs. Including being fingerprinted by the military.

Actually, they inked me both times and it was a different person both times. I have such fine ridges that you can barely see them. My 15 yo daughter says I should take up a life of crime since it would be next to impossible to trace my fingerprints. LOL I think I'll stick to the honest life. It's less stressful that way. The ironic part of my fingerprint saga is that my INS prints passed! The other prints that I was sure would be fine failed but the INS prints which I was guaranteed would fail actually passed. I was so mad the day they took them. The lady sent them by accident and then was very upset. She had another man pull them back up and he agreed that they would fail. Unfortunately, once they are sent, there is nothing they can do. They said they could not redo them until they failed. They told me to come back when I got the failure notice in two weeks. I was so upset. What a stupid computer system! Well, the failure notice never came. I finally called after five weeks only to find out that they had passed! Well, I'm still waiting. 7 weeks and counting... Jeannine