Outsourced State Department visa work criticized by House panel
Contract issued to help the department cope with what is expected to be a wave of Mexican citizens applying to renew border crossing cards.
The State Department came under fire in Congress Wednesday for outsourcing visa processing work in Mexico to a contractor without an open competition.
It created a program under which Computer Sciences Corp. has been given responsibility to collect visa information and fingerprints of Mexicans applying for new border crossing cards, which serve as an official document for Mexicans to enter the United States.
"I must admit that I have some concerns," House Oversight and Government Reform Government Management Subcommittee Chairman Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., said during a hearing.
"I think we should take a hard look at whether this type of outsourcing will maintain security and government control of visa issuance," he added.
The work by Computer Sciences Corp. is being performed under a modification to an existing contract the company has with the State Department, Tony Edson, State's deputy assistant secretary for visas, said at the hearing.
Towns hammered Edson over the issue, asking why the department did not take the time to conduct a competition and issue a formal contract.
Edson said the work was given to the company in order to help the department cope with what is expected to be a wave of Mexican citizens applying to renew border crossing cards.
The department estimates that more than 5.7 million cards will expire between 2008 and 2012, meaning that applications for them will surge.
In testimony to the committee, Edson said demand for the cards "could approach or exceed 3 million cases, well beyond the ability of our current and planned staffing for these years which could handle up to 1.8 million cases."
Edson described the work that the company is doing as a test program to examine how letting a contractor collect the fingerprints will help relieve the workload for government personnel at U.S. consulate offices in Mexico.
He is hopeful that the department will initiate a formal competition for the work at the end of the year. Regardless of the work the company is doing, consulate officials will personally interview almost all applicants for the cards, he added.
"This has the advantage of giving consular officers all of the information in the visa application in advance of the interview appointment," he said. "Upon arriving at the consulate at the appointment time, the applicant moves straight to the interview, bypassing all the waiting in line and other steps that were necessary under the old process."
The Government Accountability Office released a report Wednesday on the State Department's preparations to handle the surge in applications for new crossing cards.
GAO cited steps the department is taking to handle the surge in visa processing but said it remains uncertain how many applications the Mexican consulate will have to process.
Additionally, State Department officials must be prepared to handle applications for passports or passport-like cards from U.S. citizens living in Mexico, GAO said. By law, they will need a passport or passport card to enter the United States by land crossings beginning in June 2009.
"If State does not take the step necessary to adequately meet this growth in workload, travel between the two countries could be significantly affected," said Jess Ford, GAO's director of international affairs and trade.
But Ford said GAO has not had time to assess the new work that the department has outsourced to Computer Sciences Corp., what impact it will have on productivity and security, and whether the work is prone to fraud.
He said the department has not developed metrics to measure the success and efficiency of the test program.