 GAO REPORT FINDS PROBLEMS IN INS DOCUMENT LABORATORY
The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, recently issued a report on the INS’s Forensic Document Laboratory (FDL), which is dedicated to examining documents for authenticity. The work of the FDL has become increasingly important since September 11th, making its long-standing inability to quickly complete cases a significant problem.
The FDL was created in 1979, and, like the rest of the INS, has grown over the years. Interestingly, from 1999 to 2001, despite increases in funding and personnel, times for case completion grew. In part, according to the GAO, this is the result of an internal deadline of 90 days for processing. The FDL does not keep a record of when the forensic information will be needed, so often expends resources to complete a case for which the information is not needed for months. In addition, the number of cases pending at the beginning of the fiscal year has increased in each of the past three years.
In addition to imposing a 90-day limit, the FDL has established priorities among different types of cases. There are four categories of cases: 1) those involving a person in INS custody; 2) those involving criminal matters; 3) those involving INS administration actions that have a deadline; and 4) those involving administrative action with no deadline. Custody and criminal matters each represent about one-quarter of the FDL’s caseload. Cases with an administrative deadline are about 40 percent, and cases without a deadline make up about 10 percent.
From 2000 to 2001, the time to process each type of case increased significantly. Custody cases took 19 days to complete in 2001, up from 12 in 2000. Criminal cases took 34 days in 2001, compared with 11 days in 2000. Processing of administrative cases with a deadline increased from 106 days to 268 days, and cases without a deadline increased from 79 days to 240 days. Not only did the processing time for each type of case increase, the number of overdue cases as a percentage of the total workload increased from 26 percent in 2000 to 64 percent in 2001.
The FDL recently received additional funding and authorization to hire 31 new employees, including 17 document examiners. However, because many of them are expected to be recent graduates, they will be required to undergo a 30-month training program during which they will not be able to independently examine documents. This delay could spell more trouble for the FDL, which expects its overall caseload to begin increasing again. The FDL predicts it will not be able to eliminate the backlog of pending cases until 2006, an assumption the GAO said it could not verify because of a lack of data.
The GAO makes three recommendations for improvement at the FDL. First, it needs to implement better tracking of actual deadlines for document review so that resources are best used. Second, better data collection systems should be instituted, giving the FDL a better understanding of personnel and budget needs, and the ability to more accurately set processing deadlines. Finally, intelligence cases, those for which the information is sought as background and not for a particular use, should be separated out so that the FDL obtains better information on how to establish deadlines.
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