 INS ANNOUNCES PLANS TO INCREASE FEES
Following an audit of the INS by the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, the INS this week announced that it would be raising application fees. While the INS’s budget has increased substantially over the past few years, and thousands of new employees have been added, most of this effort has been on the enforcement side. Funding for adjudications, including asylum and refugee applications, for which there is no fee, comes almost exclusively from application fees, and the fees collected have not allowed for timely adjudications.
The increase will average about 17% per application, and should generate 7 million in additional revenue. Many advocates believe that the fees should not be increased, at least until the INS clears up backlogs of hundreds of thousands of cases, and say that applicants are being punished for INS mismanagement. The INS says that the fee increase is necessary to reduce the current backlogs and to prevent the same problems from occurring in the future. The INS hopes to have the new fee structure in place by next January.
The increased fees would not be as large as the last time the INS raised fees. The fee for applications for adjustment of status would go from 0 to 5, and the naturalization fee would increase from 5 to 0. Fees for employment authorization documents would increase from 0 to 0. The last time fees were raised, the fee for adjustment of status increased from 0 to 0, while naturalization fees went from to 5.
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