Nearly from the beginning, the attempted shift from paper to digitized application forms in most government departments has been riddled with management and technical problems.
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That is epic. I’ve described Edwards law of Cost Doubling in government, but this DHS project rises to an elite screw-up category reached by the Big Dig, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, and a veterans hospital in Denver, which all more than quadrupled in cost. While the project was initially slated to be finished in 2013, at the cost of half a billion dollars, it is now projected to finish as much as four years from now, at the cost of $3.1 billion dollars.
“You’re going on 11 years into this project, they only have one form, and we’re still a paper-based agency, ” said Kenneth Palinkas, former president of the union that represents employees at the immigration agency. The USCIS processes approximately 8 million immigration applications per year, according to the global Business Times.
Since the vast majority of those applications have to be filed by paper, immigration lawyers and their frustrated clients are still stuck shipping paper documents across the country, through a labyrinthine paper-shuffling process from government office to office. More forms will be added to the online portal by the end of 2016, he said, which are expected to account for 41 percent of all filings.
The existing immigration system is ancient and deeply flawed, causing agonizing delays for those who should be granted legal status, while making it harder for DHS to screen out security threats. The first form put up, was for foreign residents of the USA wanting to renew certain types of visas – virtually no one used it, and it was pulled. But even that one has had trouble, with many used it waiting up to a year for their new card. And pressure from the Obama administration – which, as the WaPo reported, considered the program a vital part of its plans to reform the immigration system – didn’t help. And the approach to adopting the technology was outdated before work on it began.
“It’s shameful that they’ve been on this for a decade and haven’t been able to get a working system in place, ” said Vic Goel, an immigration lawyer in Reston, Va., who has followed the computerization project as a liaison for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
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“We took a fresh start – a fix that required an overhaul of the development process – from contracting to development methodology to technology”, a USCIS spokesman told the newspaper. “Based on our recent progress, we are confident we are moving in the right direction”.
