Auditors find federal cybersecurity workforce data messy, incomplete, and unreliable

The US federal government employs tens of thousands of cybersecurity professionals at a cost of billions per year – or at least it thinks it does, as auditors have found the figures are incomplete and unreliable. 

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said that data it reviewed from 23 key US government agencies (out of 24, as the Pentagon was excluded from this report) indicated there were at least 63,934 full-time federal cybersecurity employees, costing the government around $9.3 billion per year. An additional 4,151 contractors were reported to the GAO, and those cost taxpayers an additional $5.2 billion. 

Something is very wrong with that data, however. 

"Most agencies did not have quality information on their component-level and contractor cyber workforce," GAO said. "As a result, they could not accurately identify the size and cost of their cyber workforce."

Twenty-two of the 23 agencies examined for the report ...