GAO hammers US-VISIT program
Government Accountability Office criticizes DHS for failing to strengthen exit procedures at land crossings, inability to resolve redundancies with WHTI and other programs; Congress dinged for oversight failures
Chalk up another point for the Government Accountability Office, which has been especially ruthless over the past few years in calling out inefficiently run homeland security projects. According to a new report on the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Technology program (US-VISIT), which our readers know as the biometrics-based visa screening program, DHS has succeeded in justifying only about half of its program expenditures. Although three key objectives were met, an additional three remain unfullfilled — in large part, GAO noted, because the legislation creating the program limited congress’s oversight abilities.
The three unfulfilled objectives include: A lack of effective US-VISIT exit procedures, especially at land ports, where security officials continue to use unreliable equipment. Overall, DHS attention on exit procedures has been unneccesarily and unwisely focussed on air and sea ports; a lack of operational context for the US-VISIT program in relation to other immigration programs like the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative — the result being inefficiencies and redundancies in paperwork and screening; and an increased expenditure in program management but a reduction in increasing program capability.
-read more in Alice Lipowicz’s Washington Technology report
