Alien Applications

The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) collects fees for processing aliens' applications for such things as naturalization and adjustment of status (to become permanent residents). Eighteen percent of INS' fiscal year 1997 budget, or $566 million, is earmarked for processing applications. The number of applications received by INS is growing, and there are indications that some INS field units are faster than others at processing applications. In fiscal year 1996, INS received nearly 5.4 million new applications and completed about 5.6 million applications--a 115 percent increase over the number of applications received and completed in fiscal year 1989. At the end of fiscal year 1996, INS had an inventory of about 1.7 million applications waiting to be processed. This represents an increase of about 2.5 times the pending caseload at the end of fiscal year 1989. A recent INS report found differences in application production rates and projected processing times among its district offices. This report examines differences in production rates and processing times among INS field units. GAO also asked officials at nine district offices and two service centers about the factors that accounted for the differences GAO found.

GAO noted that: (1) its analyses of INS data for the 25-month period of June 1994 through June 1996 showed that statistically significant differences existed in the production rates for the five predominant types of applications processed by INS' district offices and the three predominant types of applications processed by its service centers; (2) large differences also existed in the projected processing times for the two types of applications for which these data were readily available; (3) the data showed that INS district offices' projected processing times ranged from 112 to 678 days to process naturalization applications and from 36 to 799 days to process adjustment-of-status applications; (4) GAO found no significant statistical relationship between production rates and projected processing times among the district offices; (5) while GAO did not determine directly what caused the differences, the wide range in rates and times suggests that opportunities may exist to improve the production and timeliness of some of the INS field units; (6) to that end, GAO asked INS officials what factors they believed could potentially have caused the differences in the production rates and processing times; (7) they suggested a number of potential factors, including the following: (a) differences in the way the field units reported the data GAO used to calculate the production rates and processing times; (b) assistance provided by community-based service organizations in some districts to aliens when filling out their applications; (c) the use of outside agencies for conducting naturalization testing by some district offices; (d) the authorization of increased overtime for some districts' employees; (e) the varying experience levels and degrees of specialization of district office and service center adjudications officers; and (f) differences in the staffing levels among some district offices; (8) GAO did not attempt to determine whether or to what degree the factors suggested by the officials may have affected the individual field units' production rates and processing times; (9) however, differences in processing times mean that aliens in different INS districts have had to wait disparate amounts of time for their applications to be processed; and (10) thus, the need to treat applicants fairly and use government resources efficiently makes both determining the causes of the production and timing differences and, if feasible, improving production and timeliness, important goals for INS.

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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