After a decade and $1 billion spent on initiative.
By Raif Karerat
One decade and $1 billion dollars after embarking on an initiative to replace its antiquated approach to managing immigration with a system of digitized records, all the slow-churning gears of bureaucracy have to show for it is one single form that is now available for online applications and a single type of fee that immigrants pay electronically.
The 94 other forms can still only be filed only with physical paper, according to the Washington Post.
“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. “It’s a huge albatross around our necks.’’
This project, run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, was originally supposed to cost a half-billion dollars and be finished in 2013. Instead, it’s now projected to reach up to $3.1 billion and be done nearly four years from now.
To date, only three of the agency’s immigration forms have been digitized, and two of them were taken offline after they debuted because nearly all of the software and hardware from the original system “had to be junked.”
“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.
Government watchdogs have repeatedly blamed the plethora of problems on poor management by DHS, and in particular by the immigration agency.
Agency officials on the other hand held technology corporation IBM responsible for much of the subsequent failure, documents show, according to The Post.
Meanwhile, the Government Accountability Office has lambasted the immigration service for haphazard planning, claiming the agency awarded IBM the project contract “prior to having a full understanding of requirements and resources needed to execute the program.”