CBP is the lead federal agency charged with keeping terrorists, criminals, and inadmissible aliens out of the country while facilitating the flow of legitimate travel and commerce at the nation’s borders. CBP has three main components that have border security responsibilities. First, CBP’s Office of Field Operations is responsible for processing the flow of people and goods that enter the country through air, land, and sea ports of entry where CBP officers inspect travelers and goods to determine whether they may be legally admitted into the country. Second, CBP’s Border Patrol works to prevent the illegal entry of persons and contraband into the United States between the ports of entry. The Border Patrol is responsible for controlling nearly 7,000 miles of the nation’s land borders between ports of entry and 95,000 miles of maritime border in partnership with the United States Coast Guard. Third, CBP’s Office of Air and Marine helps to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure through the coordinated use of an integrated force of air and marine resources and provides mission support to the other CBP components. For fiscal year 2007, CBP had a $9.3 billion budget, of which $2.5 billion was for border security and trade facilitation at ports of entry. In carrying out its responsibilities, CBP operates 326 official ports of entry, composed of airports, seaports, and designated land ports of entry along the northern and southern borders. Ports of entry vary considerably in size and volume, including diverse locations such as major airports like New York’s John F. Kennedy (JFK) International Airport, and the busiest land crossing in the United States at San Ysidro, California, which processes over 17 million vehicles a year (see fig. 1); small ports in remote rural locations along the Canadian border that process only a few thousand vehicles every year; and seaports like the Port of Miami where cruise ships transport more than 3 million travelers into and out of the country each year. Most ports of entry are land border crossings located along the northern border with Canada or the southern border with Mexico. The four largest land border ports of entry by traveler volume are at San Ysidro, Calexico, and Otay Mesa in California, and the Bridge of Americas in El Paso, Texas. In total, these four ports process about 27 percent of all travelers who enter the country by land. CBP annually processes over 400 million passenger and pedestrian entries, 20 million containers, and 130 million conveyances through ports of entry. In fiscal year 2005, the most recent year for which traveler data are available by mode of entry, land border crossings were by far the busiest for processing people, with about three out of four entries into the country occurring through a land port of entry (see fig. 2). The process for inspecting travelers at airports is significantly different than the process at land ports of entry. Prior to departure from foreign airports, airline carriers electronically submit passenger manifest information to CBP. CBP officers cross-check passengers against a wide range of law enforcement databases before travelers enter the country. Upon arrival in the United States, international airline passengers are first subject to immigration inspections that check visas, passports, and biometric data (see fig. 3). Generally, international passengers arriving by air must present a U.S. passport, permanent resident card, foreign passport, or a foreign passport containing a visa issued by the Department of State. CBP officers may also inspect the luggage of travelers. CBP faces a much greater challenge to identify and screen individuals at land ports of entry, in part because of the lack of advance traveler information and the high volume of traffic at many locations. Unlike travelers who enter the country at airports, travelers entering through land ports of entry can arrive at virtually any time and may present thousands of different forms of documentation, ranging from oral declarations of U.S. or Canadian citizenship, driver’s licenses, birth certificates, passports, visas, permanent resident cards, or U.S. military identity cards. Travelers entering the country by bus or rail must provide documentation and may be subject to further inspection. CBP has implemented measures to help provide advance information on passengers arriving at land ports of entry, including trusted traveler programs that register frequent, low-risk travelers for expedited entry, and license plate readers that match license plate numbers against law enforcement databases. The Immigration and Nationality Act, implementing regulations, and CBP policies and procedures for traveler inspection at all ports of entry require officers to establish, at a minimum, the nationality of individuals and whether they are eligible to enter the country. The first requirement is for the CBP officer to determine if the person is a U.S. citizen or an alien, and if an alien, establish whether the person meets the criteria for admission into the country. Current documentation requirements for entry into the country vary depending on the nationality of the traveler and the mode of entry. For example, U.S. citizens arriving at land ports of entry currently may seek to establish citizenship to a CBP officer through an oral declaration of citizenship. In general, nonimmigrant aliens arriving at land and air ports of entry must present a valid, unexpired passport as well as, depending on country of origin and intended length of stay in the United States, a valid, unexpired visa issued by a U.S. embassy or consulate for entry into the country. As most travelers attempting to enter the country through ports of entry have a legal basis for doing so, a streamlined screening procedure referred to as a primary inspection is used to process those individuals who can be readily identified as admissible. Persons whose admissibility cannot be readily determined and persons selected as part of a random selection process are subjected to a more detailed review called a secondary inspection. This involves a closer inspection of travel documents and possessions, additional questioning by CBP officers, and cross references through multiple law enforcement databases to verify the traveler’s identity, background, purpose for entering the country, and other corroborating information. At the end of this process, the individual may be admitted, refused entry and returned to the country of origin, or detained while admissibility is subject to further review. As part of the original reorganization plan for border security, DHS found that having border security and inspections performed by three separate legacy agencies with different priorities, conflicting policies, and varying leadership structures had led to inconsistent inspections and gaps in the sharing of information between these agencies. As part of its actions to address these concerns, in March 2003, DHS created CBP by merging employees from the three legacy agencies previously responsible for border security. Among other considerations, DHS formed CBP to establish a unified command structure that was intended to reduce duplication of efforts while improving the sharing of information. For operations at ports of entry, in September 2003 CBP issued its plan for consolidating the inspection functions formerly performed by separate inspectors from the three legacy agencies. The plan, referred to as “One Face at the Border,” called for unifying and integrating the legacy inspectors into two new positions—a CBP officer and a CBP agricultural specialist. The new CBP officer would serve as the frontline officer responsible for carrying out the priority anti-terrorism mission as well as the traditional customs and immigration inspection functions, while also identifying and referring goods in need of a more extensive agricultural inspection to the agricultural specialist. CBP anticipated that having a well-trained and well-integrated workforce that could carry out the complete range of inspection functions involving the processing of individuals and goods would allow it to utilize its inspection resources more effectively and enable it to better target potentially high-risk travelers. Together, CBP envisioned the result to be more effective inspections and enhanced security at ports of entry while also accelerating the processing of legitimate trade and travel. While it has been about 4 years since the formation of DHS and CBP, our prior work on mergers and acquisitions found that it generally takes 5 to 7 years to successfully complete such a transformation. For example, GAO designated DHS’s overall transformation as a high-risk area in 2003 based on three factors. First, DHS faced a formidable task in implementing a transformation process that would effectively combine 22 disparate agencies with an estimated 170,000 employees into one department. Second, many of these agencies were facing their own challenges in management areas such as strategic human capital, information technology, and financial management; thus, DHS inherited a host of operational and management challenges from the beginning. Third, DHS’s national security mission is critically important and failure to effectively address its management challenges and program risks could have serious consequences for national security as well as have major economic impacts. CBP, as part of DHS, faces many similar challenges in its efforts to unify three agencies into one and in transforming the role of its officers. For example, with over 40,000 employees, CBP represented the largest merger of people and functions within DHS. Additionally, our prior work on the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S. Customs Service, two of the primary agencies involved in the merger, showed that these agencies experienced many management challenges before their merger into CBP. Finally, like DHS, CBP’ has a primary mission of preventing terrorist attacks that is critical to national security. CBP has had some success in identifying inadmissible aliens and other violators. In fiscal year 2006, CBP successfully caught tens of thousands of violators and it made security improvements at its ports of entry, such as installing new cargo inspection technology. Nevertheless, the agency faces major challenges in overcoming weaknesses in both traveler inspections and physical infrastructure. In regards to traveler inspections, at our request, CBP officials showed us a videotape that identified numerous examples of officers not establishing the nationality of individuals and their eligibility for entering the country as required by law. CBP took action in the summer of 2006 to address the problems by holding high- level management meetings and delivering training on traveler inspections to its officers.