The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released a report on March 9, 2018 entitled: “USCIS Has Unclear Website Information and Unrealistic Time Goals for Adjudication Green Card Applications.” While this is not surprising news to those of us who practice in this field, the report highlights a significant problem with the processing time information that the USCIS disseminates to the public.
What Processing Time Information Does the USCIS Publish? The USCIS regularly posts data on its website that purports to provide the public with information about the time it takes its various offices around the country to adjudicate certain types of applications. In particular, the USCIS posts the “age” of the applications that each USCIS field office is processing as of the date of posting. In other words, the reported information indicates that the particular USCIS field office is processing cases that it received as of a certain date. From this information, a green card applicant might reasonably assume that, if his/her application was filed prior to the published date, it should already have been adjudicated. Green card applicants frequently ask: “The USCIS website says my green card should have been approved by now, so why haven’t we heard anything?” The answer is that the information on the USCIS website is at best unclear and, at worst, simply incorrect. As the OIG report found, the processing time information on the USCIS’ website is “not helpful to USCIS’ customers because it does not reflect the actual amount of time it takes field offices, on average, to complete green card applications.”
In fact, the OIG found that the published date bears no relation to the receipt date of applications actually being adjudicated or to how long it is taking the USCIS to process similar applications. Instead, the published date is determined by a mathematical calculation based on the number of pending applications in the particular USCIS office. The calculation does not include any applications awaiting receipt of information from the applicant or any other applications on which the USCIS is unable to actively work for some reason. The OIG also found that, due to the time it takes the USCIS to collect the internal data, the processing time information is six weeks out of date by the time it is published on the USCIS website.
Processing Time: Goal vs. Reality. The USCIS’ stated goal for adjudicating green card applications, from receipt to decision, is 120 days. The actual average time has lengthened over the past several years. Indeed, the OIG report notes that since fiscal year 2011, “the overall average number of days it takes to complete applications has risen to more than twice the goal.” The OIG found that the USCIS’ 120-day goal is unrealistic given the complexity of green card adjudications and, furthermore, that having a goal “that does not reflect operational realities contributes to unmet customer expectation and reduces trust in USCIS.”
Is Reliable Information on the Horizon? The OIG has recommended that the USCIS implement plans to present more accurate and realistic adjudicatory time frames to the public. This would certainly be a welcome change. In the meanwhile, the processing time estimates published by the USCIS should be taken for what they are: “unclear and unrealistic,” and applicants should think twice before placing too much reliance on them.
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