Hey everyone, I applied for a position at an agency a few months ago and up until my polygraph, everything was going  well. The BI was started up basically the day after my SF-86 was submitted and revised, and my contacts were beginning to get calls from investigators within a week. I was truthful with everything on the forms and in my personal interview with the background investigator. When it came time for the poly, I was feeling fine until the examiner started drilling me on the ‘serious crimes’ question. I had answered no because I had obviously not committed any serious offenses other than the minor transgression that I could think of before we ran charts. (I told him about a few instances of skipping scanning items in a Walmart as a teenager before I was hooked up). During the test and after he said I had tripped up on that question, I was thinking of anything that could be misconstrued as a serious crime and started telling him about any and all of my misdeeds as a young man - like underage drinking, getting into bars underage, and other instances of shoplifting in my teenage dumb ass years - memories that came rushing back during my examination. (And you don’t have to tell me how stupid that is… I know. Especially when my parents would have paid for basically anything for me.). In the end, he said that my poly was inconclusive and that I would need to come in for a second one, but he wasn't able to fit me in for another go within the week. I left feeling pretty down in the dump - like I should have sat and thought longer and tried to think of and tell him everything BEFORE I was hooked up. Instead, I feel like it looked to him like I was intentionally withholding things from him.

It has been almost two weeks since the poly and in the mean time I have completed my Psych eval with no hiccups. I still haven’t received a date to come in and re-test unfortunately.

Do you think I screwed myself by admitting to illegal things after the poly was administered?  It's now my understanding that it's the cardinal sin of polygraphs lol.