A Decade Into a Project to Digitize U.S. immigration Forms, Just 1 Is Online

Heaving under mountains of paperwork, the government has spent more than $1 billion trying to replace its antiquated approach to managing immigration with a system of digitized records, online applications and a full suite of nearly 100 electronic forms.

A decade in, all that officials have to show for the effort is a single form that's now available for online applications and a single type of fee that immigrants pay electronically. The 94 other forms can be filed only with paper.

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, putting in jeopardy efforts to overhaul the nation's immigration policies, handle immigrants already seeking citizenship and detect national security threats, according to documents and interviews with former and current federal officials.

From the start, the initiative was mismanaged, the records and interviews show. Agency officials did not complete the basic plans for the computer system until nearly three years after the initial $500 million contract had been awarded to IBM, and the approach to adopting the technology was outdated before work on it began.

By 2012, officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which includes USCIS, were aware that the project was riddled with hundreds of critical software and other defects. But the agency nonetheless began to roll it out, in part because of pressure from Obama administration officials who considered it vital for their plans to overhaul the nation's immigration policies, according to the internal documents and interviews.

Only three of the agency's scores of immigration forms have been digitized - and two of these were taken offline after they debuted because nearly all of the software and...

I’ve WORKED WITH government programmers.

I had a government job with a local county agency. As a contractor I loved what I did there for a living- they offered me a permanent gig at half my rate, but good benefits so I took it.

It immediately turned into the worst job I ever had in my life and I hated it. government employees are the worst clock-watching back-stabbing busybodies on the planet.

So I quit... and the guy they replaced me with was cousin Jeffrey, from the parks department. Literally.

He was the nephew of the country executive, and he was mowing lawns on Friday and came in to write software on Monday.

I had to show him how to turn the computer on. He is probably still there (10 years later)

I had originally planned to take the civil service test for that position, but the ‘practice tests’ you could find online were all about COBOL programming and how to put a tape drive onto a mainframe (30 year-old technology) and nothing to do with this job. But if you got the practice test and memorized the answers you could ace the real test.

This was the job where they paid $50,000 for a 500 megabyte hard drive array (when you could buy a single 1 gig disk for $350 at the time)

They paid $80,000 for a ‘xml interface’ that basically took data from one table and put it into another table. I did it myself in 5 minutes at the meeting where I complained about it.

There is NO WAY to accept refunds, so they agreed to give us free hours of ‘customer support’ (remember, this was to move data from one table to another)

It was also the place where there was one guy working on a radio interface for 6 months. I needed it and could not wait any longer and so wrote it myself in 3 hours. They did not use it and continued to let him work on it for 3 more months. When he finally handed it in, it took a sudden successful turn (but looked suspiciously like my code)

I also had to show the database administrator how to turn on the database.

Rather than break the software up into separate modules, they insisted it had to be one large EXE that took over an hour to compile. Mine was the only module that you could compile separately in 10 seconds, and retest 100’s of times a day (rather than max 8 times) When I left the boss insisted “we HAVE TO get that merged into the main program”

They had a full-time accountant, with a CAR and a free parking spot right in front of the building in the downtown of the city. His job was to handle “accounts receivable” (remember- there was NO WAY to accept refunds, so there was never any ‘accounts receivable”) He ran his outside accounting business while working there all day.

THE ENTIRE GOVERNMENT BUDGET should be immediately cut in half. if not more.

Leon Rodrigues is Boobamba's hand-picked bagger at USCIS---which is rubber-stamping Muslims and other miscreants into our country at an accelerated rate. The WH ding-a-ling and his hand-picked govt agency bagmen are helping themselves to our tax dollars under the guise of phony projects like this one.

TAX-PAYING AMERICANS NEED TO GO THIS ROUTE to nail greedy govt officials like Rodrigues and DHS Jeh Johnson, Barack Obama and Loretta Lynch labeling taxpayers terrorists, Bill and Hillary Clinton imperiling taxpayers' ntl security, Lois Lerner and John Koskinen targeting taxpayers, all the criminal members of Congress, and other factotums on the govt payroll.

===============================================

BACKSTORY The 1980 Georgia General Assembly was concerned about the increasing sophistication of various criminal elements on the public payroll (and those in elective and appointive office). The Georgia General Assembly then adopted the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), patterned after a similar federal law.

(RICO is routinely used to try to prove that a legal business was being used for illegal means, and, in at its inception, RICO was used to prosecute drug traffickers or organized crime members).

In recent years prosecutors have applied RICO to crooked government officials: (1) those accused of using their public offices for personal gain, and, (2) tax-paid officials of govt agencies using public monies to flout the law.

To bring a case under Georgias RICO law, there must be at least two underlying felonies such as fraud, bribery, witness tampering (among other felonies).

RICO allows prosecutors to include multiple defendants charged with various crimes in the blanket indictment, and to charge that govt employees, publicy-funded and publicly-sanctioned entities were allegedly part of an ongoing criminal enterprise.

EXAMPLE A govt official commits two felonies by (1) accepting, and, (2) filing falsified documents.

==============================================

HERE'S THE PATHWAY TO LAUNCH---Texas took the lead w/ 26 state AG's, successfully arguing that Obama's beatified DACA/DAPA's were made more desirable employees than US citizens.

==============================================

Any public official using tax dollars to flout that law is a lawbreaker: in cases where govt officials on the public payroll not giving public notice is a violation at the federal level of the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act, which requires notice in the Federal Register. Laws demand that taxpayers have the opportunity to submit views in writing.

===============================================

NOTE If proof is established that RICOed criminal public officials impaired the commercial and economic activity of the region, that could also be prosecutable under the Hobbs Act.

PRIME RICO TARGETS John Boehner and his Congressional buddies are complicit in the massive fraud, waste, and criminal use of tax dollars......and the flagrant abuse of taxpayers. They could have reeled in arrogant govt agencies conducting criminal activities (DHS, EPA, IRS, BLM, HUD, DOE and DOL). They could have defunded the criminal enterprise called "Obamacare" and the Planned Parenthood parasites living the high life w/ our tax-dollars....but to taxpayers' eternal disgust....they didn't.

The gummint NEVER manages a project correctly.

The only way that would be possible is impossible, because they would have to give up control of the project, and that will NEVER happen.

gummint hacks know nothing about a successful, major project, yet because of POLITICAL goals, will not concede authority over any project to professionals that could bring it in, on time and under budget.

This fact is going to be President Trump's {if he wins} biggest challenge.

Trump is used to putting the best people on a project, and letting them run it.

In gummint, that ain't happening.

I can probably give some insight into just how grossly incompetent the people running this system are, because my wife and I are going through this right now. I married a Russian citizen in February. We wanted to do things legally, so rather than have her come here on a travel visa and apply for adjustment of status, she stayed in Moscow and we began the process of trying to get her and her son moved here. I filed the I-130 form for both of them and paid $830 in fees. That form and the fee payment are not available online. You have to submit all of it through the mail. I guess I should clarify that when I say the form is not available online, I mean that it’s not available to submit online. You can download the form in a printable and fillable PDF version.

After submission of the forms and payment, which require a large deal of supporting documentation to be submitted simultaneously, you receive a case number from USCIS. If you have signed up for electronic alerts, you will receive an alert that the case number was issued, but rather than telling you what to do on the alert page, they tell you to look at the letter that you will receive for further instructions. Thankfully, our letters arrived in the mail. If they had not, then I would have had to submit a request to get additional copies of the letter, which would have added to the process.

Once you receive those letters, they instruct you to monitor the website to see what kind of processing time you can expect for your case. In our case, the website said that it would be 5 months. They tell you not to call or submit any kind of inquiry until that expected processing time has passed. The obvious quasi threat there seems to be that if you submit an inquiry before that time has passed, your application may inconveniently end up on the bottom of someone’s pile. So, after waiting patiently for 5 months and never seeing any kind of update on the case status page, I finally began trying to inquire as to what the status of our case was. When I got about the third person on the phone, she said “oh, I see why your case hasn’t processed yet. They are asking for 55 additional days.”

It’s important to note that nowhere on my case status page online or on the website which indicated a five-month processing time was there any indication that the office was running two months further behind. It’s also important to note that the online case inquiry tool continued to tell me that my case was within normal processing time even though the full five months had passed and the information on the website that they refer you to to check the processing times continued to say 5 months and never changed. Same thing applied to the online tool for trying to set up an appointment at the local office. That tool would tell me that my case was within normal processing time even though five months had passed.

We were upset about the additional 55 days, but what can you do? Then, about 7 days after that inquiry from the customer service agent, I received email alerts telling me that our cases had been approved. So, obviously, the 55 day extension was just something they tell you when they don’t have another answer.

Again, the email alerts did not give me any information other than informing me that the status of the cases had changed to approved. The alerts directed me to look at the letters that I would receive in the mail for further information. There was no link and is no link allowing me to see an online copy of the letters that I was sent.

I did receive the letters, again, thankfully, so now we are waiting for the National Visa Center to contact us and let us know what to do next. Some of what we do next is available online. We are in the one status that they said the forms have been put online, which is applying for lawful permanent resident status for a US ccitizen’s spouse. I have to say that the whole process is very confusing and extremely time consuming. It is a bit embarrassing, because my wife has gotten both of her passports and several other documents updated by the Russian government all within less time than it has taken just to get an approval on this initial form from our Immigration Service. More than once, she’s gotten frustrated to the point of telling me that it seems the US doesn’t want her. That’s not a good feeling for someone who is uprooting her life in Moscow and moving here, I’m sure.

When DHS and USCIS submit billion dollar budgets to Congress----Boehner and the rest could come up w/some penetrating questions WRT the purposes of the request....in the interests of taxpayers pocketbooks.

Plus there is a law that compels govt agencies to submit cost-analyses and results of tax-subsidized projects.

Congress could also order an audit of these agencies.

=========================================

Homeland Security seeks $41.2 billion budget for 2016
February 4, 2015 By BioPrepWatch Reports

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson announced a $41.2 billion budget request Monday for the 2016 fiscal year.

The budget would improve the unity of effort at the department, Johnson said, focusing on harmonizing DHS business processes. Along with the budget, a new Common Appropriations Structure was also submitted to Congress, which would standardize financial planning, programming and budgets for all DH agencies, Johnson said.

There are five areas the department focuses on each year, and the budget is in alignment with those five missions, Johnson said.

<><> The first mission is to prevent terrorism and enhance security in the country by implementing security for the land, air and at sea.

<><> The next mission is to secure and manage the countrys borders, and reduce the number of illegal immigrants and amount of contraband getting into the United States.

<><> The third mission includes enforcing and administering immigration laws and providing safe and secure detention of illegal immigrants in federal custody if they are a flight risk or a public safety concern.

<><> The fourth mission deals with safeguarding and securing cyberspace, which impacts economic security. The 2016 budget would invest in technology and staff to reduce cybercrime and improve the security of federal network defenses.

<><> The fifth mission, Johnson said, is to strengthen national preparedness and resilience so the country can prepare and respond to any type of disaster.

Johnson said before Congress approves any funding for the next fiscal year lawmakers should approve funding for the current year.

The Presidentâ€™s FY 2016 Budget provides the resources necessary for the Department of Homeland Security to further strengthen our efforts to fulfill our wide-ranging missions, while also being agile and vigilant in the face of ever-evolving threats and recent world events, Johnson said. â€œBut prior to acting on the FY 2016 Budget, I urge Congress to fully fund DHS for the rest of this fiscal year, as the current continuing resolution is disruptive, creates uncertainty, and impedes efficient resource planning and execution.â€

SOURCE http://bioprepwatch.com/news/homeland-security-seeks-41-2-billion-budget-for-2016/340791/

====================================

Feel safe, yet?

No surprise here. Back in college I cooped with the USDA extension service in DC. Every month the commodity reports were distributed to the field thru our office. Being timely about that was VERY important but the procedure to do so was ponderous at best and very long. I scripted it and reduced the time from well over an hour to 5 minutes. Oh man, I got into SO much trouble. :) My manger called me into his office and dressed me down something awful. However, the cat was out of the bag and his superiors wanted to know why things changed so radically over night. :) LOL, so he ‘requested’ I completely document my script and procedure for using it. :) That was the assignment from hell...everything had to be perfect or it couldnt be used. In the end I prevailed tho. Bottom line was I now KNEW I never wanted to work for the govt. In later years I worked with a prime govt contractor (doing work for NASA) and that was almost equally miserable. It seems everything they touch is blighted...truly.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.