Politics News

Digital Immigration Form Is Most Expensive In History

After 10 years and one billion dollars spent on digitizing America’s immigration system, only one form has been digitized. The other 94 forms can only be filed with paper, hurting Obama’s plans for immigration reform. While the project was initially slated to be finished in 2013, at the cost of half a billion dollars, it is now projected to finish as much as four years from now, at the cost of $3.1 billion dollars.

The DHS has acknowledged the setbacks, but said that the department has abandoned earlier plans and is moving towards a new system based on cloud computing.

According to Fox News, USCIS commented “USCIS is actively working to go agile and move our application processes online. The Transformation initiative is developing that capability and will allow us to eventually move away from processing 8 million paper-based benefit requests a year. But fixing a broken immigration system is not easy and this has taken longer than originally planned.”

USCIS is actively working to go agile and move our application processes online. The Transformation initiative is developing that capability and will allow us to eventually move away from processing 8 million paper-based benefit requests a year. But fixing a broken immigration system is not easy and this has taken longer than originally planned.

According to The Washington Post, the initiative was mismanaged from the start. The records and interviews show that it was not until three years after the initial allocation of $500 million to the project that the basic plans for the computer system were built. “It’s a huge albatross around our necks,” said Kenneth Palinkas, former head of the USCIS union.

Even the forms that were put online were plagued by difficulties. The first form put up, was for foreign residents of the US wanting to renew certain types of visas — virtually no one used it, and it was pulled.

The next, focusing on immigration for foreigners who wanted to enter the US to invest in a business, didn’t do much better, and was also pulled.

The one remaining form allows permanent residents to renew their green cards online, and in almost 200 cases applicants either did not receive their cards or had to wait up to a year.

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