Immigration Services to Step into Modern Times
By: Gerri L. Elder
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is set to get a technology makeover and will soon go to a paperless system.
The Bush administration has selected a group of industry professionals led by IBM to create an electronic system to help the government handle the 7 million immigration applications it receives each year for visas, U. S. citizenship and approval to work in the United States.
The five-year, $500 million plan to convert U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services' case management system from paper-based to computer-based could help reduce the processing delays and backlogs by at least 20 percent if it is successful.
The Washington Post reported that people working closely with the project have said that the new system could improve the immigration paperwork backlog and delay problems that routinely frustrate new Americans and other immigrants by as much as 50 percent.
The new modern-day system will allow government agencies, such as the Border Patrol, FBI and Labor Department to access immigration records much faster and with greater accuracy. There are plans to integrate the system with initiatives to link digital fingerprint scans to unique identification numbers in order to create lifetime digital records for applicants.
Another perk of the new system is that it will do away with the filling and refilling of paper forms, which are currently stored at 200 locations in approximately 70 million manila file folders. Trees everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief.
The plan is known internally as the transformation initiative. It is considered a stepping stone to broader efforts to fix the immigration system, which many consider to be one of the most broken branches of the federal government.
During the great immigration debate of 2007, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials suggested to potential contractors that $3.5 billion worth of work might be required to create and implement the new system. However, if Congress ever gets around to overhauling immigration laws to create a guest-worker program or to allow illegal immigrants to obtain legal status in the United States, more changes would have to be made and the cost would be increased.
Prakash Khatri, a homeland security consultant at KPK Global Solutions, said that the new system of case management will completely change the way USCIS and its predecessors have operated for the past 50 years. He also said that the success or failure of the system will determine the effectiveness of any future changes in the immigration system.
IBM was selected to serve as the "solutions architect" for USCIS. The contract was the largest federal homeland security bid on the market and includes a $14.5 million, 90-day assessment period with options over five years worth $491.1 million.
The project is being funded in part by a summer 2007 fee increase on immigration applications. This fee increase will bring in $650 million over five years.
The agency's old paper filing system incurs costs of $100 million a year in archiving, storage, retrieval and shipping. It is slow and clumsy and has led to the loss or misplacement of more than 100,000 files. This out-of-date paper system has also contributed to delays and backlogs of millions of immigration cases.