INS User Fees

INS Working to Improve Management of User Fee Accounts Gao ID: GGD-94-101 April 12, 1994

This report provides information on the Immigration and Naturalization Service's (INS) two major user fee accounts: the Immigration Examinations Fee Account and the Immigration User Fee Account. GAO discusses (1) the methods INS used to set its fees, (2) if the fees reflected the actual costs of providing services, (3) if the expenditures from fee accounts were consistent with the purposes of the accounts and management and control of the fees were enough to prevent misuse of fee revenue, and (4) whether staff were allocated in proportion to workload among the districts providing services that were financed by the fees.

GAO found that: (1) INS established immigration application fees by identifying direct labor costs for application processing and adding a surcharge to cover the costs of processing asylum applications; (2) in establishing the fees, INS did not prorate indirect costs in proportion to direct costs; (3) INS is required to review the fee biennially and recommended a fee increase in 1993; (4) it could not determine the extent to which INS identified the full costs of providing service, but INS plans to determine the full cost of providing fee-related services; (5) fee account budgets and support costs have grown since 1990; (6) INS expenditures were consistent with the accounts' purposes, and management controls were adequate; (7) INS did not properly account for fees it collected for the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) or reimburse EOIR for costs associated with the adjudication and naturalization of aliens; (8) INS and EOIR had no policies or procedures for managing EOIR fee revenue; and (9) INS did not allocate its adjudications and naturalization staff in proportion to its workload at its four largest districts, resulting in backlogs in application processing.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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