Audit Finds New INS Safeguards Are Failing

In a scathing report, an independent auditor concluded Friday that Immigration and Naturalization Service offices from Los Angeles to Newark have failed to implement new safeguards designed to ensure the integrity of the nation’s scandal-scarred citizenship process.

The report was the latest blow to the embattled naturalization program run by the INS, which revamped safety procedures in November in the face of criticism that convicted felons had been granted citizenship. INS Commissioner Doris Meissner vowed at that time that no one would be naturalized without passing a full FBI criminal background clearance, including a fingerprint check.

But citing “inherent weaknesses” in procedures, the accounting firm KPMG Peat Marwick said it could not guarantee that the INS was rejecting applicants “with disqualifying conditions,” such as serious criminal convictions.

That central finding called into question previous assertions by Meissner and other top administration officials that glaring deficiencies in the criminal background check procedures had been corrected.

Meissner called the report “extremely troubling” and said remedial action had already begun. Top INS management was summoned to Washington this week to review and correct the flaws, said Meissner, who also dispatched about 200 personnel to a federal training complex in Georgia for a two-day course.

Among the myriad problems identified by the auditors were sloppy paperwork and filing omissions, conflicting instructions at field offices and a failure to provide now-mandatory supervisory review of applicants with criminal records.

However, the limited scope of this review--described by officials as selected spot checks of case files, a precursor to a full-blown, 60-day audit scheduled to begin next month--did not include follow-through to determine if convicted felons had actually been improperly granted citizenship.

After visiting two dozen key INS facilities nationwide--including five in Southern California--the auditors concluded that only the Boston district office was in full compliance with new safeguards.

The Los Angeles and San Diego district offices were deemed “noncompliant,” while the Bellflower, El Monte and Laguna Niguel sites were credited with “marginal compliance.”

Allegations from Republican legislators that thousands of ineligible criminals have been granted citizenship sparked an outcry in Congress and focused intense public scrutiny on the Clinton administration’s Citizenship USA program, launched two years ago with the goal of improving and expediting a long-neglected naturalization process. The White House vehemently denied Republican charges that the program was an election year effort to enroll new citizens likely to vote for Democrat candidates.

The Justice Department hired the auditing firm to review citizenship procedures.

The reeling naturalization process continues to receive an ever-expanding number of applicants, about one-quarter of them from Southern California.

Largely behind the surge, experts say, are widespread fears of new laws targeting immigrants.

About 1.8 million people are expected to file for citizenship in the current fiscal year, almost 25% more than last year’s record and a sixfold increase from just five years ago.

Time-consuming new procedures have helped push the waiting periods to 12 months, double the time needed last fall, said Richard K. Rogers, INS district director in Los Angeles. He voiced the hope that the shortcomings identified by the auditors would be “quickly correctable.”

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who heads the House immigration subcommittee, said the study showed “gross abuses of the system,” and vowed to convene hearings and submit corrective legislation.

The agency’s overseers in Congress have repeatedly excoriated Meissner’s management in recent months, but neither Smith nor other top Republicans have publicly called for her ouster as chief of the vast immigration bureaucracy, which has a budget of more than $3 billion.

Meissner said Friday that she will be seeking congressional approval of a sweeping plan to “fundamentally restructure” an agency long assailed as a bastion of incompetence.

An ongoing federal inquiry has revealed that criminal background checks had not been completed on 180,000 citizens sworn in during 1995-96. But Clinton administration officials say investigators have thus far turned up fewer than 200 cases of improper naturalizations, and are moving to revoke citizenship in those cases.