In 1996, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), Inspections Division, issued Immigration and Naturalization Service Document Fraud Records Corrections, report number I-96-09, in which we recommended that the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) " . . . develop a flagging system that will alert INS personnel to alien participation in fraud schemes." We initiated this follow-up inspection to determine whether INS developed and implemented procedures to flag automated database records of aliens suspected of obtaining immigration documents and benefits fraudulently and whether the recommendation had the intended effect.

This follow-up inspection analyzed the actions taken by INS in response to our 1996 report. We focused our efforts on assessing INS's establishment of a method for flagging the automated database records of 4,585 aliens that were identified during our inspection as being associated with OIG criminal investigation cases involving immigration documents and benefits obtained fraudulently.¹ We did not, however, determine whether there were any additional cases implicating aliens in fraudulent document schemes for which records should have been flagged.

1. As a result of our 1996 inspection, the OIG provided INS with identifiers (i.e., alien numbers, names, and dates of birth) for over 4,700 individuals. However, when we requested the list of identifiers during this follow-up inspection, INS could provide us with an automated file for only 4,585 individuals. INS Central Index System technical staff informed us that the remaining records could not be provided due to technical and data entry errors.