Nothing has improved. The Department of Justice Inspector General and the General Accounting Office will provide details of their respective investigations with INS automation, INS financial management, and internal communication. Government Executive magazine and Syracuse University's Maxwell School studied fifteen government agencies, and the INS received the lowest grades of all agencies studied. Regarding INS service, the INS currently has a backlog of 4.4 million pending applications for benefits. This includes 1.8 million naturalization petitions and 800,000 applications for permanent residence.
Employment based petition often take more than three years.
The INS has stopped adjudicating most applications besides naturalization. The other backlogs will simply continue to grow. It takes 15 months to two years to become a citizen, despite my pleas to set 90 days as a reasonable goal. Due to the lengthy backlogs, applicants' fingerprints are lost or expire, requiring them to be refingerprinted. The INS lost the fingerprints of one applicant, Mrs. O'Connell, four times.