Nebraska Service Center On behalf of the officers and staff of the Nebraska Service Center, welcome to Lincoln and the NSC!! And, on a personal note, thank you for the opportunity to speak with you here today. As any person or organization does, the NSC has a story to tell. Ours is one that often gets lost in the day-to-day [?] of adjudicating individual cases and [?].

March 11, 2002 This was a hugely important date in INS history. I’d like to see a show of hands as to who knows what happened that day. This is the day—remarkably six months to the day after 9/11—that I-20s for two of the 9/11 hijackers were received by Huffman Aviation in FL and it’s the date, I believe, that our agency’s mission took a tremendous turn—rightly so—in the direction of homeland security agency. You will recall that prior to the 2000 election, candidate Bush campaigned on a promise to reduce the immigration casework backlog. Subsequent to his election, he established the goal that all cases would be processed in 180 days or less by 9/30/04. As of this date, the NSC was on track to accomplish that. But everything changed. Over the following months, background check requirements changed tremendously…and often. I often speak of the third week of November 2002. I can’t remember any of the changes that came about that week, but I can certainly remember the week. At least twice we implemented procedures only to read e-mail messages within hours that made them obsolete or inappropriate.

Here’s what happened from a productivity standpoint Here’s what happened from a productivity standpoint. Basically, it took us fifteen months to stabilize processes and start refocusing on productivity. (By the way, what’s causing these spikes is us pushing through a significant number of system-qualified I-90 applications.)

And, here’s what happened to our pending levels And, here’s what happened to our pending levels. Pending casework went from just over 600,000 to a shade over 1.1 million in fifteen months. Interestingly, based on our expectation that we’d be meeting our backlog reduction goals, we had reduced our file storage capacity, so, when pending skyrocketed, we had huge space issues. Any of you who visited us last year will remember files down the center of the aisle in our IT department and in one of our upstairs conference rooms. Those are gone now, though we still have them in two of our downstairs conference rooms. I’ll also point out here that our pending is still almost 30% higher than it was at the end of Feb, 2002.

And finally processing times And finally processing times. This is a comparison of processing times on 2/28/02 and at the end of September. A green background in the last column means the processing time is shorter than it was then 3-1/2 years ago; a red background indicates it’s longer. Here again, you can see that we haven’t gotten back to where we were 3-1/2 years ago.

I share this graph to make the point that care about the quality of our casework decisions and the administrative processing that’s necessary to ensure cards and travel documents are produced properly, validity dates are correct.

This graph illustrates one of the major challenges we’ve had over the last several years. In FY01, we were allocated a 49.8% increase in staff and in FY03, we were allocated another 26.6% increase. The overall result was a 99% increase. In years gone by, we had a structured training program whereby an officer graduated form by form from less to more complex work, starting with a foundation and building upon it. These kinds of staffing increases have made that impossible. We have had times where we’ve trained officers on a form type and had them adjudicate it without context so they might not have a grasp of [?] that we’d like.

Enough about the past, let’s look for a few moments at the future Enough about the past, let’s look for a few moments at the future. This is a chart that hangs in various places throughout the Center. If there’s a green background in the right-hand column of a line, the NSC has achieved the processing time goal for that product. Otherwise, it shows the number of cases by which we need to reduce the backlog in order to meet the goal. You can see that 89% of our backlog is in three products: I-485s, I-730s and I-751s…

…and that’s reflected in our priorities

THE NSC COMMITTMENT