WASHINGTON, May 9 (UPI) -- The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services bureau is bungling its new plan to automate immigration files, the GAO says.
The CIS bureau's $190 million project to automate 55 million paper-based immigration files has suffered from inadequate planning, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office, GovExec.com reported Monday.
If management does not improve, the program risks "falling short of expectations and its funding requests cannot be justified," the GAO said in the report, reference number GAO-06-375.
The agency has not developed an adequate plan for either the program or the contractors working on it, GAO said. For instance, there is no plan for evaluating ongoing digitization tests, and agency officials have not determined which files will be scanned, the report said.
By launching a pilot program, CIS jump-started the eight-year initiative -- known as the Integrated Digitization Document Management Program -- to electronically scan existing paper immigration files to make them easier to store and access. Four contracts worth more than $10 million were awarded in the fall of 2005, and the agency plans to award a fifth worth $14 million, the report said.
The documents, known as alien files, or A-Files, are kept for 75 years under a National Archive and Records Administration mandate, and are used within the Homeland Security Department, of which CIS is a part, and other federal, state and local entities, to adjudicate immigration status and benefit applications.
The pilot project would involve scanning about one million files that include a particular immigration form and support documents, to verify that the digital format works and to allow officials to determine storage requirements and potential problems.
The GAO report said that if all forms were digitized, the cost for scanning and storage could be as much as $550 million, GovExec.com said.
