How to Fill Out and Submit the DoD Foreign Travel Reporting Form

To complete a DoD foreign travel reporting form, gather your dates, destinations, purpose of travel, and an emergency contact, then submit the information to your Facility Security Officer (FSO) or Security Manager before you leave the country. Your security office enters the report into the Defense Information System for Security (DISS), the DoD’s personnel security system of record.¹ You do not file directly in DISS yourself.

The form itself is not standardized across the department. Some commands use a locally produced cover sheet, others rely on a digital security portal, and SCI-indoctrinated personnel may have a separate questionnaire. Ask your security office which version applies to you before you start filling anything in.

Information the Form Asks For

A representative DoD foreign travel report collects the following core fields:²

Your full legal name and telephone numbers.
An emergency contact — name and phone number for someone who can be reached while you are abroad.
Every country and city you plan to visit, with the dates you will be there.
The purpose of the trip: tourism, family visit, medical care, a personal event.

SEAD 3 itself only requires dates, destinations, and the nature of travel.³ Anything beyond that — hotel addresses, travel companions, flight numbers — is added by your command or agency. Fill in what your local form asks and do not guess at fields you do not understand; the security office would rather answer a question than fix a report later.

Trips to U.S. territories (Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands) are not foreign travel and do not go on this form. An unplanned day trip into Canada or Mexico can be reported within five business days of your return instead of before you leave.⁴ Every other trip abroad, no matter how safe you consider the destination, gets reported before departure.

Foreign Contacts to List

If you already know you will meet with a foreign national during the trip, or you have a continuing personal relationship with someone at your destination, that contact usually requires its own report alongside the travel form. The Defense Intelligence Agency’s unofficial foreign contact form, which is a useful reference even if your agency uses a different version, asks for the foreign national’s name, citizenship, occupation and employer, the frequency and nature of your contact, and any known affiliation with a foreign intelligence or government organization.⁵

Under SEAD 3, reportable contacts include relationships involving bonds of affection or personal obligation, close and continuing relationships, romantic relationships, cohabitation, and business or professional relationships outside your official duties.³ A conversation with a shopkeeper does not belong on the form. A developing friendship, a romantic partner, or a foreign business associate does.

Financial and Gift Items

Personnel in Critical Sensitive or Special Sensitive positions have additional items to disclose: direct involvement in foreign business, ownership of foreign property, and foreign bank accounts.⁴ Every covered person, regardless of clearance level, must report gifts or favors from foreign nationals or entities, including business offers, investment opportunities, and employment offers.³ If any of these apply, tell your FSO when you submit the travel report so they can capture them on the correct form.

How and When to Submit

You hand the completed information to your FSO (for contractors) or Security Manager (for military and DoD civilians). They enter the report into DISS. Since August 2022, DCSA has allowed bulk upload in DISS, which lets FSOs at larger companies submit multiple employees’ travel reports at once, at intervals not exceeding 30 days.¹

SEAD 3 requires the report to be submitted prior to departure.³ If a trip is genuinely unplanned and you could not report in advance, notify your FSO as soon as possible and no later than five business days after the travel.⁶ Give your security office as much lead time as you can. Early submission gives the FSO room to arrange a pre-travel briefing or flag concerns about the destination before your ticket is non-refundable.

Pre-Travel Briefing

After you submit, your security office may schedule a defensive travel briefing. These sessions cover vulnerability awareness, personal safety, the terrorist threat in your destination country, how to reach U.S. assistance contacts abroad, and indicators that a foreign intelligence service may be targeting you.⁷ The material is practical: what to do if someone pressures you for information, how to protect your electronic devices, how to avoid becoming an inadvertent target.

If your destination appears in the Director of National Intelligence’s threat assessment, your FSO is expected to coordinate with DCSA’s Counterintelligence and Insider Threat division for an appropriate briefing before you depart. The FSO should also give you the National Counterintelligence and Security Center’s “Safe Travels” resource for country-specific threat information you can read on your own.⁶

What to Report After You Return

Filing the pre-travel form does not close out the trip. Within five business days of returning, notify your FSO about any of the following:⁸

Any deviation from the itinerary you originally submitted.
Unplanned meetings with foreign government officials, foreign company representatives, or foreign citizens, with the reason for the contact.
Contact with anyone who may be connected to a foreign intelligence service, or any travel anomaly with counterintelligence significance.
Any encounter with foreign law enforcement, detention, or customs incidents.

If any of those apply, especially contact that felt like a recruitment attempt, your FSO should coordinate a formal post-travel debriefing with DCSA CISA.⁸ The debriefing is not disciplinary. It helps counterintelligence professionals assess whether a foreign service tried to collect information or build leverage. Reporting a suspicious contact protects you; concealing one is where clearance problems begin.

What Happens If You Skip the Form

The most common consequence for failing to report is a reevaluation of your clearance eligibility.⁹ Outcomes range from a documented warning in your security file to suspension or revocation. Deliberately concealing travel or lying on the form raises the stakes: knowingly making a false statement or omitting material facts in a government security matter can be prosecuted under 18 U.S.C. § 1001, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.¹⁰ Criminal prosecution for a missed vacation report is rare. Actively falsifying one is a different category of problem.

An honest report about a trip to a high-risk country is routine paperwork. An undisclosed trip that surfaces during a periodic reinvestigation looks like concealment, and that perception alone can end a career in the cleared workforce.

1
Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency. SEAD 3 Unofficial Foreign Travel Reporting
2
U.S. Army Garrison Ansbach. Foreign Travel Report – Cover Sheet and Instructions
3
Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Security Executive Agent Directive 3 – Reporting Requirements for Personnel with Access to Classified Information or Who Hold a Sensitive Position
4
Defense Logistics Agency. Employees, Contractors Must Now Report All Foreign Travel, Other Activities
5
Defense Intelligence Agency. Unofficial Foreign Contact Report
6
DCSA/CDSE. Industrial Security Job Aid
7
Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency. Travel Security Awareness
8
Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency. SEAD 3 Job Aid – Unofficial Foreign Travel Reporting and Activities Checklist
9
Defense Business Board. Foreign Travel Reporting Procedures for DBB Members
10
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 1001 – Statements or Entries Generally