The US Department of Justice's Office of Inspector General has released an audit of the BCIS's Premium Processing Program ("PPP") that finds that it has adversely affected processing times in regularly filed cases. Published processing times from the four INS service centers back up this conclusion. Processing times have gone from one to two months to six months or more for I-129 nonimmigrant classification applications. This is despite the fact that the program has generated a $136 million in extra funds.

The Premium Processing Program, established in June 2001, allows applicants to pay a $1000 additional fee in certain employment-based nonimmigrant applications for a guaranteed 15 calendar day turnaround time on an application.

The INS regulation that established the Premium Processing program requires the agency to use the money generated by the PPP to hire additional adjudicators, contract representatives and support personal to provide service to all its customers and to improve the infrastructure so as to reduce backlogs of all types of petitions and applications.

The report made several major findings:

1. The PPP has adversely affected the time to adjudicate routine applications and petitions. The backlogs for regularly filed cases have steadily increased since the PPP came online. There are now 3.2 million cases in the backlog.
2. The INS Service Centers have not conducted IBIS security checks in a timely manner. 11,830 Premium Processing petitions were adjudicated without IBIS checks between January 28, 2002 and March 18, 2002.
3. The INS lacks reliable data about the Premium Processing workload and the resources it requires.