An audit by Peat Marwick, one of the world's largest accounting firms, concludes that the INS has made major strides in correcting flaws in the naturalization program. The INS came under serious criticism last year when it was accused of naturalizing thousands of "criminals." A later audit revealed that fewer than 300 applications were granted mistakenly, but the INS nevertheless instituted measures that have been praised in the Peat Marwick report as improving quality control in the naturalization program.

The Peat Marwick report states that "The INS has made significant improvements" and that it has "greatly reduced the risk of incorrectly naturalizing an applicant." The report is in sharp contrast to a report released by Peat Marwick last April that found that the INS' new safeguards were only being implemented by one of 24 INS field offices. In the follow-up audit, Peat Marwick found that of 4,000 cases sampled, only 11 had processing errors and that no one was improperly naturalized.

"We are proud of the results of this report because it shows the tremendous amount of progress we have made over the last eight months," said INS Commissioner Doris Meissner. "The systemic problems have been fixed, and we will continue to work with field offices to ensure that we address any isolated processing problems that might still exist."

Margaret McCormick, the President of the American Immigration Lawyers Association also praised the report, but hoped that the INS would address the growing backlog of citizenship applications. According to McCormick, the backlog will cause current citizenship applicants to wait over two years to be sworn in.

INS Commissioner Doris Meissner has stated that the INS intends to devote much of the next year to addressing the backlog, a pledge cautiously welcomed by McCormick. "AILA commends INS' plans to reduce this huge backlog. While timely adjudications of naturalization applications remain a high priority, we want to make sure that sufficient resources are also allocated to family and employment-based adjudications so that the reduction of one backlog does not lead to the creation of others," McCormick said.