Posted on April 7, 2006

House Panel Hits Push to Fast-Track Alien Benefits

Stephen Dinan, Washington Times, April 7, 2006

A congressional panel demanded yesterday that the Department of Homeland Security explain why one of its agencies rewards employees with “benefit parties” and cash, movie tickets or extra vacation time for granting immigration benefits quickly — a situation that an agency whistleblower said threatens national security.

Michael J. Maxwell, who recently resigned as head of the Office of Security and Investigations at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said USCIS routinely ignored warnings about fraud, redacted information from reports to Congress to hide problems, failed to investigate hundreds of criminal complaints against employees and forced hundreds of adjudicators to rule on cases without being able to see some information from security databases.

Democrats and Republicans on the terrorism and nonproliferation subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee vowed to get to the bottom of the charges.

“We haven’t even checked the checkers, and we’ve instead decided to blindfold them,” said Rep. Brad Sherman of California, ranking Democrat on the subcommittee.

And the subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Ed Royce, California Republican, said the system, rather than focusing on security, “is rigged to approve immigration applications.”

Mr. Maxwell told them that just this week he heard from an agency employee who said her supervisors were pressuring staff to process 16 cases per hour — an average of less than four minutes per application.

“The system has been designed at this point to allow for the benefits adjudications to go through the system with very little quality assurance,” he testified. “The employees are tempted to grant benefits in order to receive cash [and] time off.”

Incentives are skewed to push for approvals, he said, because supervisors have to review only denied applications.

Mr. Maxwell also said he met an agency manager who told him of “benefits parties” thrown for employees who adjudicate the most applications each month.

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