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GCN Home > 10/11/04 issue

DHS system puts immigration data at users' fingertips

By Wilson P. Dizard III, GCN Staff

Keeping track of more than 50 million paper files documenting foreigners’ dealings with immigration authorities would be a challenge under the best of circumstances.

But when the files are spread across 92 offices around the world, it becomes a truly daunting task.

The Homeland Security Department’s Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, one of three successor bureaus to the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, has responded with a Web application that makes locating and requesting files faster and more efficient.

INS began work on the National File Tracking System in 1999, developing requirements that led the agency to start coding in late 2001.

The agency has entered into the system about 80 percent of aliens’ files, also known as A files, and plans to complete the task by March.

CIS has deployed the system to 87 of its 92 file control offices spread across the world—from Bangkok to Washington and everywhere in between.

The new system has reduced the time required to locate and request an A file from 24 hours to three seconds, according to Betty Mattson, IT director of CIS’ Records Management Office.

“Every single person who applies for immigration benefits in this country is assigned a main number consisting of nine digits and the letter A,” said Mattson, a 12-year government veteran who started with INS 7 ½ years ago.

An alien’s file starts as a jacket that already bears an A number; the first item to be entered is the initial request for an immigration benefit.

Immigration benefits can be permission to study, work, apply for naturalization or extend a stay in the country under a different visa category, among other status changes.

“CIS adjudicators use the information in the file to go to other systems to see, for instance, what benefits a person is entitled to,” Mattson said.

Before the agency adopted NFTS, it used an application called the Receipt Alien File Accountability Control System. RAFACS was a client-server system that used servers at each of the dozens of offices holding files.

RAFACS updated its servers around the world each night via a batch interface.

“Using RAFACS, you could go into our central index and you could see which file control office a file was in, but you had no idea where within the office a file was,” said Kelly Gilmore, a special assistant in the records office.

Under RAFACS, adjudicators requesting files had to take the further step of generating a paper pull ticket informing the file’s holder of the request.

More news on related topics: Content / Record Management, Great Managers, Homeland Security, IT Infrastructure, Management, IT Management, COOP / Telework



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