GAO Report on Green Card Applications Security Review

The Government Accountability Office (”GAO”) has published a report, “Actions Needed to Address Vulnerabilities in Process for Granting Permanent Residency” which reviews the process of security review of applications for legal permanent residency.  GAO’s recommends that USCIS establish a timetable for addressing the deficiencies noted in the report and establish procedures that would require some sort of verification of certain evidence submitted with petitions for legal permanent residency.

Among the most notable items of the report was the criticism and reserved hope that FBI will clear the backlog of pending security checks.  According to the GAO,  of the approximately 917,000 applications for LPR USCIS received from January 1, 2006, through May 31, 2007, 516 (0.05 percent) were referred to USCIS’s Office of Fraud Detection and National Security (FDNS) for national security concerns.

In addition, USCIS had encountered delays in obtaining the results of FBI name checks—FBI checks of its investigative files—for LPR applicants and others, and had issues regarding the usefulness of these results, but USCIS and the FBI have taken a number of actions that have improved these checks. The FBI dedicated more staff to process name checks, and USCIS provided additional funding and training to FBI staff. As a result, the number of pending name checks has decreased 90 percent, from 329,000 in May 2007 to 32,000 as of September 30, 2008. The FBI plans on being able to complete all name checks within 90 days of receipt by June 2009.

Finally, some concerns were raised about the ability of USCIS to detect benefit fraud, most notably lack of ability to  verify evidence submitted in support of LPR petitions.  GAO’s recommendation was to implement some requirements and procedures whereby certain evidence submitted by petitioners be properly verified.  USCIS has agreed with this recommendation and has indicated that it would work on creating a set of guidelines on supporting document verification.  It is unclear at this time what these guidelines would look like.