It seems almost ludicrous to blame local employer USIS for having a role in the Edward Snowden security-leaks scandal. But recent news reports have federal investigators insinuating Snowden twice passed USIS background security checks, when an in-house background check might have blocked his employment with the CIA and NSA.

A background check into USIS itself paints a different scenario and portrays USIS as a convenient scapegoat for damaging revelations leaked by Snowdown.

U.S. Investigations Services was established in 1996 when the investigative part of the Office of Personnel Management was privatized. The intent was to shrink government by outsourcing services and to capitalize on a “peace dividend” from the end of the Cold War.

The company, now known as USIS, won a contract to provide security clearance background investigations to more than 95 federal agencies. It started hiring people at its Boyers facility and later at Grove City.

This unfolded three years after a rental truck full of explosives blew up beneath the World Trade Center, detonated by two men hoping to topple the towers as punishment for U.S. meddling in Middle Eastern affairs. The WTC towers withstood the blast, but six people perished — seven, counting the unborn child of one of the victims.

Defense and intelligence officials regarded the attack as an isolated incident perpetrated by lone extremists. Americans were too busy prospering in the ’90s to recognize the emergence of a new global threat. It still made sense to outsource security background checks in a climate bereft of any Soviet-sized adversary.

That all changed Sept. 11, 2001, however, when a second attack destroyed the World Trace Center and killed nearly 3,000 people. The war against terrorism was on. National security again became paramount — and USIS suddenly found itself awash in new business, adding the newly formed Department of Homeland Security and Transportation Security Administration to its list of federal contracts.

At the time, nobody said it might be prudent to go back to doing in-house background investigations. Nobody was saying “You can’t outsource national security,” as one retired CIA official declared last week.

Now, investigators say they have evidence USIS repeatedly misled the government about the thoroughness of its background checks. The alleged transgressions are so serious that a federal watchdog indicated he plans to recommend the Office of Personnel Management end ties with USIS unless it can show it is performing responsibly. The inspector general of OPM is examining whether USIS failed to meet a contractual obligation that it would conduct reviews of all background checks the company performed — that USIS failed to double-check its results, in other words.

That seems harsh, given Snowden’s shocking revelations about top-secret NSA programs collecting massive amounts of data from private American citizens, mining megadata from cell phone companies and tapping into transoceanic fiber-optic telecommunication cables.

While an embarrassed federal government has charged Snowden with espionage, A group of retired CIA agents honored him last week for taking a stand for integrity and ethics.

USIS may or may not have operational problems, which may or may not have sprung from the times in which it formed. Either way, Snowden is not a USIS problem.