INS is responsible for ensuring that persons eligible for immigration benefits receive them in a timely manner while aliens who are ineligible are denied benefits. Some ineligible applicants attempt to obtain immigration benefits through fraudulent means. Immigration fraud falls into two broad categories—benefit application fraud and document fraud. Benefit application fraud involves the willful misrepresentation of a material fact to gain an immigration benefit in the absence of lawful entitlement. Benefit application fraud includes immigration benefit fraud schemes such as marriage fraud, in which an ineligible alien makes a false claim to a bona fide marriage with an eligible petitioner in order to obtain immigration benefits, and occupational preference fraud, in which businesses in the United States claim falsely that aliens are needed for employment because of their education, technical knowledge, or experience and that such people are not available in the U.S. workforce. Benefit application fraud also includes nonimmigrant visa fraud. Document fraud encompasses the counterfeiting, sale, or use of documents, such as birth certificates, passports, or visas, to circumvent U.S. immigration laws and may be a part of some benefit application fraud cases. According to INS, both are often part of larger alien smuggling efforts. INS processes alien applications and petitions for benefits (e.g., naturalization, employment authorization, adjustment of status) through a network of field offices. INS’s four service centers, located in California, Nebraska, Texas, and Vermont, process 35 types of applications, including petitions for permanent and temporary workers, petitions for admission of spouses, and applications for employment-based adjustment of status to permanent residence. The service centers were established to handle the applications and petitions for benefits submitted for processing by mail. About 68 percent of all immigration applications and petitions are filed at the four service centers. INS’s 33 district offices process 42 types of applications. Most of these applications require interviews with the applicant or verification of an applicant’s identity. District offices process naturalization applications and petitions for alien relatives and family- based adjustment of status applications, among other types of applications. Detecting and preventing immigration benefit fraud in applications involves different INS units—3 regional offices, 4 service centers, 33 district offices, and INS’s Forensic Document Laboratory. In fiscal year 2000, INS expended about $2.8 billion on enforcement activities. About $26 million, or 1 percent of enforcement program funds, were expended for fraud detection and prevention activities, including benefit application fraud. Funding has remained basically the same from fiscal year 1998 to fiscal year 2000. For fiscal year 2001, INS received an additional $7.5 million for investigative and analyst positions for antifraud investigations associated with fraudulent business-related visa applications and with marriage fraud. Both the service center operations units and district office investigative units may open possible benefit fraud cases on the basis of information that they receive from adjudication officers; from other INS components, including Investigations, Inspections, and Intelligence; from INS regional offices, the public, including informants; and from other federal and local law enforcement agencies. The adjudication staff in each of the units may also detect fraud because of their responsibility for ensuring quality in the application adjudication process. INS’s operations units attempt to detect benefit fraud through database checks for misrepresentations of information (e.g., nonexistent addresses) on applications and other analysis. These units also try to identify trends and patterns that may indicate fraud, such as increases in the number of requests for certain types of cards, for example, applications for replacement of alien registration cards (green cards). However, once immigration benefit fraud is suspected, the matter is generally referred to district offices for investigation. The service center may continue to provide support for field investigations and prosecutions. In fiscal year 2000, INS’s district investigative units opened approximately 4,000 cases involving fraud, almost half of which involved marriage fraud.For this same period, the units completed about 3,700 fraud cases.Adverse actions, such as a conviction or removal, were taken in almost half of those cases. Of the 483 defendants prosecuted for fraud, 259 were convicted. Comparable data are not kept on the number of cases or on analyses done at the service centers. Federal statutes provide for a range of criminal charges against persons and entities for violations of immigration laws. INS officials indicated that fraud cases are time consuming, resource intensive, complex, and difficult to prove. U.S. attorneys accept fraud cases under established prosecutorial priorities and resource availability. The priority placed on the prosecution of such cases varies among the 94 U.S. attorney offices around the country. Statutes also provide penalties and other sanctions for civil document fraud. Additionally, INS can use administrative remedies, such as denial or revocation of a benefit that applicants are not entitled to receive. Efforts to address benefit fraud are given a lower priority than other priorities within INS, and resources devoted to it are limited. INS’s interior enforcement strategy focuses resources on areas that would have the greatest impact on reducing the size and annual growth of the illegal resident population. Of the five priority areas outlined in the strategy, benefit fraud ranks fourth nationally. The priorities are to (1) identify and remove criminal aliens; (2) deter, dismantle, and diminish smuggling of aliens; (3) respond to community reports and complaints about illegal aliens; (4) minimize immigration benefit fraud and document abuse; and (5) block and remove employers’ access to unauthorized workers. The strategy allows district offices some flexibility in prioritizing their resources, and some offices may make fraud a higher priority. Nationally, however, it remains fourth. According to INS, the investigation of immigration fraud has long been an enforcement mandate of INS’s Investigations Division. However, resources identified for fraud have been redirected as a result of legislation such as the employer sanctions provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act and Department of Justice initiatives such as the Violent Gang Task Force and criminal alien removal. INS district office investigations workyear data show the amount of time devoted to fraud activities compared with other investigative categories, as shown in figure 1. For fiscal years 1998 through 2000, about 11 percent of investigative workyears was directed for fraud investigations. According to INS officials, these workyears underestimate the time spent on benefit fraud investigations. This is because immigration benefit fraud may be uncovered during the course of another type of investigation and the time spent is recorded in the other investigation category. For example, antifraud activities that are conducted under the auspices of the Anti-Smuggling, Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, and Organized Crime units are not included in the amount of funds expended in antifraud efforts. However, INS does not have data to show the nature and extent of its efforts to investigate immigration benefit fraud in connection with its other activities. Additionally, few resources are devoted to the service center operations units that have responsibility for gathering information to help detect and deter fraud. The service centers received about 4 million applications in fiscal year 2000, and the four operations units that perform analysis for fraud detection had about 40 positions. INS’s forensic document laboratory provides document analysis for field investigations and is a significant resource for fraud investigations. The laboratory has established four priority categories for assisting investigations. Immigration fraud falls in the last category. The administration has proposed a restructuring of INS. In addition, legislation has been introduced to accomplish this. Although these proposals are different in some respects, they are similar in that they would separate INS’s enforcement and service activities into independent units. A major difference among the proposals is the individual to whom the units would report. At the time we completed work on this report, these proposals were still under consideration and it had not yet been determined specifically how immigration benefit fraud enforcement activities would be carried out. Although the extent of the benefit fraud problem is not known, internal and external reports and the views of INS officials indicate that the problem is pervasive and significant. The following examples provide some insight into the extent of benefit fraud: In a fiscal year 2000 Threat Assessment, INS predicted that fraud in obtaining immigration benefits would continue to rise as the volume of petitions for benefits grows and as smugglers search for other methods to introduce illegal aliens into the United States. INS reported that one of the more prolific schemes seen in recent years is the abuse of various nonimmigrant visa (e.g., tourist visa) provisions that can lead to permanent residency and ultimately to naturalization. In May 1999, the Acting Deputy Executive Associate Commissioner for the Immigration Services Division testified that immigration benefit fraud had increased in both scope and complexity in recent years and that exploitation of the benefit petition process by criminals and criminal organizations had generated serious concerns. He stated that criminal aliens and terrorists manipulate the benefit application process to facilitate expansion of their illegal activities, such as crimes of violence, narcotics trafficking, terrorism, and entitlement fraud. In 1998 and 1999, INS referred petitions to the Department of State consular post in Chennai, India, because of suspected applicant fraud. State found that about 45 percent of claims made on the 3,247 petitions referred through March 31, 1999, were of questionable validity, and 21 percent of the work experience claims made to INS were confirmed to be fraudulent. In recent reports on INS programs, we reported vulnerabilities in both the H-1B and Religious Worker Visa Programs. These vulnerabilities include abuse by employers in the H-1B program who falsely requested and certified the need for foreign workers and abuse by some religious organizations that existed solely as a means to carry out immigration fraud in the Religious Worker Program. INS’s California Service Center found, through a series of investigations and analyses, widespread L-1A visa fraud by foreign companies, particularly in the Los Angeles area, and also identified this fraud as a growing problem. In one phase of the study, the service center reviewed a targeted group of 5,000 petitions that were identified as fitting a particular set of criteria. About 90 percent of these targeted petitions were identified as fraudulent.