Federal User Fees: Improvements Could Be Made to Performance Standards and Penalties in USCIS's Service Center Contracts

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is responsible for granting or denying applications or petitions of foreign nationals seeking to become citizens of the United States or to study, work, or live in this country. In order to process the millions of applications and petitions that USCIS receives each year, USCIS uses contractors to perform various support services including SI International, Inc. and Stanley Associates for mail operations, fee collection, data collection, and file operations at its four service centers, in California, Nebraska, Vermont, and Texas. The contracts with these two firms are expiring, and USCIS has the option to extend the contracts for one year beginning in December 2008. We understand that USCIS may be planning to propose possible contract changes for the option year. Based on our ongoing work on USCIS user fees, we believe that improvements could be made to these contracts before the options to extend the contracts are exercised. The purpose of this report is to summarize our initial observations on performance standards and financial deductions to assist USCIS in obtaining the most value and highest level of performance from its contracts and contractors. In our forthcoming report we will address contract management issues.