Customs Service

Members of Congress asked GAO to analyze (1) the implications of any differences between the levels of cargo and passenger inspectors at certain airports and seaports around the United States and the levels determined by the U.S. Customs Service to be appropriate for these ports and (2) any differences among the cargo and passenger processing workload-to-inspector ratios at the selected ports and the rationales for any significant differences in these ratios. GAO could not perform the requested analyses because Customs has not assessed the level of appropriate staffing at its ports and because of concerns about the quality of Customs' workload data. In addition, Customs considered factors other than workload, such as budget constraints and legislative limitations, in determining its needs for inspectors and allocating them to ports. According to Customs officials, these factors must be considered in their decisionmaking in order to maximize the effectiveness of deployed resources. On the basis of statements from senior Customs officials and their responses to earlier GAO recommendations, GAO believes that Customs recognizes that staffing imbalances may exist at certain ports and that it needs to improve how it assesses the need for and allocates inspectors to ports of entry.

GAO noted that: (1) over the past 3 years, Customs has assessed the need for additional inspectors to combat drug smuggling through ports along the Southwest border; (2) Customs also uses a quantitative model to estimate the need for inspectional personnel at airports, but not to establish the appropriate personnel levels, according to Customs officials; (3) however, Customs does not have a systematic, agencywide process for assessing the need for inspectional personnel and allocating such personnel to process commercial cargo or land and sea passengers at all of its 301 ports; (4) therefore, GAO was not able to identify the implications of differences between assessed and actual inspectional personnel levels; (5) GAO was also not able to perform the workload-to-inspector ratio analyses because it did not have a sufficient level of confidence in the quality of the workload data; (6) GAO identified a few significant discrepancies in the workload data it obtained from Customs headquarters and the ports it contacted, and it did not identify any systematic controls over the quality of the data; and (7) in addition, workload is only one of several factors Customs has considered in the few assessments completed since 1995; Customs also considers factors such as the smuggling threat at each port and legislative constraints on the movement of certain inspectional positions.