Overhaul of USCIS with IBM Services

The Washington Post is reporting that USCIS has obtained the services of IBM to assist immigrants with obtaining their visas, application for citizenship and work permits. 

Just a note here, while we applaud USCIS for taking the initiative to bring their archaic system of paper processing into the new age, but who will be paying for this new system. It looks like there might be yet another fee increase.

The Washington Post article is below. 

The Bush administration has launched a massive overhaul of the nation’s long-troubled immigration services agency, tapping an IBM-led industry consortium to re-invent the way government workers help immigrants obtain visas, seek citizenship and get approval to work in the United States.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service announced that it has asked IBM to be its “solutions architect” to change the technology and processes used by its 16,000 government and 6,000 contract workers at 280 locations nationwide.

The contract, awarded this week and the largest federal homeland security bid on the market, includes a $14.5 million, 90-day assessment period with options over five years worth $491.1 million, and a ceiling value of up to $3.5 billion if Congress approves a broad overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws that unleashes a flood of applications for legal status or other actions.

“IBM is pleased to support the USCIS mission. We believe this project will serve as an important model for other agencies seeking to transform the delivery of important government services,” said Charles L. Prow, managing partner of IBM Global Business Services for government. “Through this ambitious initiative USCIS will employ new tools to support benefits adjudication, and ultimately, improve their customers’ experience navigating the immigration process.”

The USCIS transformation effort is a long-awaited, much delayed undertaking that is years behind initial schedule yet considered a cornerstone of any broader effort to fix an immigration system all sides say is one of the most broken bureaucracies in the federal government.

The agency, which was spun off from the former U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services and merged into the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, receives about 6 million to 8 million applications from immigrants a year, but relies on a pre-computer age, paper-based system of 70 million files identified by immigrants’ “A-numbers” or alien registration numbers.

The system costs tens of millions of dollars a year for to archive, store, retrieve and ship files; has led to the loss or misplacement of more than 100,000 files; and contributed to backlogs of hundreds of thousands of cases and delays of months and years, auditors have found.

Immigration officials say modernization efforts have been delayed since 1999 by funding problems, inertia, increased security demands, and the DHS reorganization. The USCIS transformation initiative itself was proposed in 2004, but has been delayed by bureaucratic infighting, indecision and caution as other major homeland security contracts have gone off track, such as SBInet, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection effort to build a “virtual” fence using surveillance technology on the border, and Deepwater, the Coast Guard’s massive fleet replacement effort.

USCIS took a low-key approach in announcing the IBM project, mentioning it at the end of a press release and briefing to reporters about its achievements during the year.

The agency called the initial task order “just one of the building blocks of USCIS’ overall transformation plan the agency is funding with the help of a summer 2007 fee increase on immigrant applicants that is bringing in about $1 billion a year.

“We’re proud of 2008 and the milestones we’ve met,” USCIS Acting Director Jonathan “Jock” Scharfen said in a statement. “But, much work remains. We are gearing up for 2009 with a forward-looking and robust agenda that will result in an even better immigration service for our customers and our great Nation.”