The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, within the Department of Homeland Security, delivers services to aliens and adjudicates their eligibility for various immigration benefits, including naturalization, adjustment of status to lawful permanent resident, employment authorization, and asylum. USCIS carries out its service function through a network of field offices consisting of a National Benefits Center, which serves as a central processing hub for certain benefit applications and utilizes secured depositories in Chicago, Illinois, and Los Angeles, California, to collect fees; 4 service centers, which generally adjudicate applications that do not require interviews with the applicants; 78 district and local offices; 31 international offices and 8 asylum offices, which generally adjudicate applications that require interviews; and 129 application support centers, which collect and process biometric information. Appendix II contains a detailed discussion of USCIS’s organizational structure. USCIS’s application-processing procedures vary by application type and by office. Figures 1 and 2 depict the agency’s process for adjudicating naturalization and adjustment of status applications—its two most common and complex application types. In general, the following tasks are involved in application processing: (1) collect and deposit application fees and issue receipts to applicants; (2) create or request existing alien files; (3) enter applicant data into an automated system; (4) take applicants’ fingerprints and send them to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for a criminal history check, including a criminal history check based on the applicant’s name (if required by the type of application); (5) review application, and other supporting documents, such as FBI fingerprint check results, marriage certificates, or court dispositions of an arrest; (6) interview applicants (if required by the type of application); (7) administer naturalization tests (for those applying for naturalization); (8) approve or deny cases; (9) notify applicants of USCIS’s decisions; or (10) issue a Notice to Appear placing applicant in removal proceedings; and (11) update USCIS’s automated systems. Although USCIS processes about 50 types of immigration benefit applications, its backlog elimination efforts have focused on the 15 application types that make up about 94 percent of its workload. Table 1 lists these 15 application types and their purposes. In October 2000, the Immigration Services and Infrastructure Improvements Act mandated INS, the agency previously responsible for USCIS’s functions, to develop a plan to eliminate its backlog of benefit applications. The act defines backlog as the period of time in excess of 180 days (6 months) that an immigration benefit application has been pending before the agency. Moreover, in February 2001, in the President’s fiscal year 2002 budget, the Administration proposed a universal 6-month standard for completing adjudication of immigration applications and supported a 5-year, $500 million initiative to meet this standard. The President reiterated this goal during a naturalization ceremony on July 10, 2001, saying, “Today, here’s the goal for the INS: a six-month standard from start to finish for processing applications for immigration. It won’t be achievable in every case, but it’s the standard of this administration and I expect the INS to meet it.” In May 2001, we reported on the difficulties INS had in managing its workload, resulting in ever-growing backlogs of applications, despite growth in staff and budget. For example, although the agency’s efforts to meet production goals for processing naturalization and adjustment of status applications did help reduce backlogs in those areas, backlogs for other application types increased. Under a 5-year plan starting in March 2002, INS intended not only to eliminate the immigration benefit application backlog, but also to achieve a 6-month processing standard for all applications in every office. The original plan was to eliminate the backlog in 2 years, with the remaining years used to invest in information technology in order to prevent future backlogs. However, in part because of events following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, including attention to national security priorities and agency reorganization, INS’s resources were diverted from backlog elimination efforts. For example, adjudicators assumed responsibility for registering and fingerprinting nationals already living in the United States from countries identified as potential threats and for overseeing the student immigration tracking system—functions that have since been transferred to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bureau within DHS. In June 2004, the newly formed USCIS issued a revised backlog elimination plan that proposed to eliminate the backlog of benefit applications by September 30, 2006, and to reduce application completion times to no more than 6 months. As of June 30, 2005, USCIS estimated it had about 1.2 million cases remaining in its backlog, down from 3.7 million at the end of fiscal year 2003. However, USCIS’s operational definition of backlog is different than the definition contained in the Immigration Services and Infrastructure Improvements Act of 2000, and its count is not a precise reflection of the number of cases that have been pending for more than 6 months. USCIS defines its backlog generally in terms of its pending workload—that is, the number of applications it has on hand minus the number of applications it has received during a specified period of time, which is 6 months or less, depending on the type of application. It has established targets for each fiscal year for reducing its pending workload, by application type, based upon its estimate of how much time is required to complete each type. Table 2 shows these workload targets by application type and fiscal year. According to USCIS, the data management systems it currently uses to manage its backlog elimination efforts cannot comprehensively produce data to measure and track the time that all applications have been pending, and therefore the agency cannot readily retrieve information on the number of applications that have been pending for more than 180 days, as specified in the definition of backlog in the Immigration Services and Infrastructure Improvements Act of 2000. Instead, USCIS estimates its backlog based on the number of pending applications in excess of the applications it received during the past 6 months. For example, if the agency had received 100,000 applications for benefits in the most recent 6 months and currently had 120,000 cases awaiting adjudication, it would report a backlog of 20,000 cases. The agency’s rationale for using this proxy is that by consistently completing more applications than are filed each month, the agency should gradually reduce its pending workload of applications to a level at which it can complete all incoming applications within the workload targets established for each application type. Eventually, according to the agency’s backlog elimination plan, as long as USCIS is processing all applications received within the past 6 months (or less, depending on the application type’s workload target) there should be no backlog because those applications awaiting adjudication should be completed before they become part of the backlog count of applications pending longer than 6 months. However, USCIS’s definition of backlog does not guarantee that every applicant requesting a benefit will receive a decision within 6 months of filing. In our previous work on the benefit applications backlog, we noted that the agency’s automated systems were not complete and reliable enough to determine how long it actually takes to process specific benefit applications or to determine the exact size of its backlog. Therefore, we recommended that the former Immigration and Naturalization Service develop the capability and begin to calculate and report actual processing times for applications as soon as reliable automated data are available. USCIS has agreed that ideally it would prefer to base its backlog calculations on the actual age of each pending application. However, the data management system USCIS is currently using to manage its backlog elimination efforts does not have this capability for most application types. Since our recommendation, USCIS has identified requirements for transforming its information technology systems to address deficiencies in its capabilities. Starting in fiscal year 2002, INS and subsequently USCIS invested about 2 percent ($10.5 million) of its funds allocated for backlog elimination in planning for technology improvements. Table 3 shows USCIS’s annual expenditures from its backlog elimination funds. Included in USCIS’s technology transformation effort is the design and implementation of a new, integrated case management system that should provide the agency with the capability to produce management reports on the age of all pending benefit applications. USCIS considers this new case management system to be one of the most critical components of its technology transformation and plans to begin implementation in fiscal year 2006. However, this information technology transformation effort is still in the early stages of planning, and USCIS does not expect these systems, including the new case management system, to be fully deployed before fiscal year 2010. Until USCIS develops the ability to track the actual age of individual applications, it will not be able to provide accurate information about the actual number of applications that have been pending in excess of 180 days or the actual amount of time they have been pending. USCIS has taken several actions to eliminate its benefit application backlog and to reduce the time it takes to process benefit applications. The most immediate short-term action was to hire temporary adjudicators—whose terms expire within 4 years—to address the backlog. In addition, USCIS began to implement longer-term strategies to eliminate the backlog, such as reallocating staff and reprioritizing the order in which the agency adjudicates petitions for alien relatives. The agency also has revised its guidance to increase the efficiency of application processing and has proposed related changes to its regulations. Finally, it has experimented with different processes to expedite application adjudication and is considering adopting best practices identified from those pilot programs. In addition to its efforts to reduce the backlog by September 30, 2006, the agency has developed a staffing allocation model and is planning a major transformation of its information technology systems to prevent future backlogs. According to the model, USCIS must fill positions that are currently vacant and better balance the number of adjudicator staff among the field office locations.