That's the conclusion of a new U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report about IT practices undertaken by USCIS, which wants to digitize more than 55 million paper-based immigration case files to make them easier to use, store and transfer to other federal agencies and law enforcement authorities. (http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d06375.pdf)
In its report, the GAO said that USCIS "has not developed a plan governing how it will manage this program and its contractors, and it has not developed an evaluation plan for its ongoing digitization concept of operations pilot test, even though it has awarded or plans to award contracts totaling about $20 million for this project."
The GAO report also criticizes the agency because it has not yet identified exactly which of its more than 50 types of forms in the alien immigration files, called A-Files, will be scanned and stored -- even as the program is being created. "Without a defined scope and adequate planning, this program is at risk of falling short of expectations," the report states.
The USCIS, which is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, uses the A-Files in 89 of its 250 offices across the country to grant or deny immigration-related benefits, capture status changes for non-citizens, prosecute immigrants who violate immigration laws and to provide a document chain of custody for enforcement, according to the GAO report. The paper-based records, some of which include hundreds of pages of documents, must be kept for 75 years. Maintaining the huge number of files costs more than $400,000 in paper and copying machines for each USCIS service center annually, while the agency spends another $13 million a year to ship files back and forth between offices. To cut these costs, the agency wants to digitize the records so they can be transferred between agencies electronically and stored more easily.
Another problem cited by USCIS is that its existing IT systems are often not integrated and don't offer wide information-sharing capabilities, resulting in data integrity and reliability concerns. Users of the files may need to access more than a dozen different systems using up to 17 unique passwords, making the process of gathering information difficult and time consuming.
To accomplish its goal, USCIS began an Integrated Digitization Document Management Program (IDDMP) and is in the process of awarding five contracts for a pilot program. Funds for that project had to be allocated before last September or they would have expired, according to the GAO report.
The GAO review, which was issued internally on March 31 to DHS and publicly on April 30, was conducted between last August and this past February.
The report does credit USCIS with a recent decision to re-examine its long-term digitization efforts as part of an agency-wide transformation initiative, but the GAO said USCIS continues to lack focus because it hasn't yet fully documented the larger transformation initiative.
The lack of project planning was raised in December during a project workshop by one of the vendors involved in the program, according to the GAO report.
"Discussion points during this workshop included IDDMP's lack of a clear vision and business objectives, critical gaps in the digitization approach, confusion regarding terminology and roles and responsibilities, and the lack of a management plan," the GAO said. "Restated, this means that large sums of resources are being invested, and much larger sums are likely to be invested, on a program that lacks plans for ensuring that the resources are invested effectively and that resource estimates are valid."
The author of the report, Randolph Hite, director of information technology architecture and systems issues for the GAO, could not be reached for comment Friday.
In response, Steven Pecinovsky, director of the departmental GAO/Office of the Inspector General Liaison Office in the DHS, said his agency agrees that "robust planning and management will help ensure success" of the program and that clear, focused steps are being taken to accomplish that, including creation of management teams with clear goals and the creation of procedures, priorities and implementation targets and strategies.