The Immigration and Naturalization Service has done a poor job of managing its $3 billion effort to modernize information technology systems, leading to rising costs, delays and doubts that the modernization will improve INS operations, the Justice Department Inspector General said in a new report.
Inspector General Michael Bromwich said INS managers could not explain delays and had not developed adequate performance measures to gauge whether the new systems work. In addition, "costs continue to spiral upward with no justification for how the funds are spent," Bromwich said. INS spent $800 million on modernization from 1995 to 1997. The modernization is expected to cost $2.8 billion through 2001-that estimate is up $200 million since the IG first audited the program in March 1998.
"INS could not sufficiently track the status of its automation projects to determine whether progress was acceptable given the amount of time and funds already spent," Bromwich wrote in an audit report released last week. "As a result, INS continued to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on automation projects for which there were inadequate budgeted costs or explanations for how the funds were spent."
The IG found similar problems in his previous audit, underscoring the intransigence of technology management problems federal agencies have faced over the past decade. The INS is not alone in its struggle to rein in technology beasts-the Internal Revenue Service, the Agency for International Development, the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Weather Service have all struggled with delays and cost overruns on major modernizations.
In INS' case, the IG found that managers did not compare actual costs with baseline estimates, preventing the agency from identifying problems that could be expensive to fix. For example, a November 1996 spending plan totaled $81 million. Ten months later, the spending plan had increased to $279 million, "with no justifications provided as to why the additional funds were required," the IG said.
If a project was running late, managers simply changed the expected completion date. Managers should have kept milestone dates as a benchmark by which progress could be measured, Bromwich said.
"Managers created the perception that their automation projects were progressing on schedule when, in fact, at least seven projects had experienced significant delays in only 14 months' time," the IG reported. "In contrast, by reporting the latest estimates against fixed milestones, project managers would have alerted senior [technology] managers of the delays, prompting them to initiate corrective actions to ensure projects remain on schedule."
Other management problems the IG identified included:
- Performance data and status reports were hard to come by; managers did not have the information they needed to make smart project management decisions. "Instead of easily accessible data with hard and fast figures, the repeated INS theme was that the real answers to our questions were just one more document, discussion, listing, or meeting away," the IG said.
- Senior managers did not regularly review project schedules and costs at pre-arranged checkpoints.
- Eighty-four percent of modernization projects that should have had performance measures did not have any established performance measures.
The IG gave INS credit for reducing its warehouse inventory. In 1997, the IG found $2.4 million of new equipment sitting in a warehouse instead of in use in the field. INS has reduced most of that inventory, the IG found. INS has also improved its management of technology contracts, the IG said.
INS Commissioner Doris Meissner agreed with the IG's recommendations for improving technology management, and said many improvements have been made since the IG completed his audit, including beefing up performance measurement.
"INS is moving forward to fully implement a system of performance measures as required by the Government Performance and Results Act," Meissner said. "We have concentrated our initial efforts within the information resources management arena on developing comprehensive performance measures for the most important projects having the highest impact on field operations."
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