April 15, 2003. - The Office of the Inspector General, Audit Division of the United States Department of Justice issued a 90-page report in March 2003, which severely criticized the INS (now BCIS) Premium Processing program. The Premium Processing program was established in June 2001 to permit payment of a $1,000 surcharge in exchange for expedited processing of certain types of immigration applications such as H-1B and L-1 petitions.

The report, which can be accessed at: http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/audit/0314/final.pdf, essentially states that the Premium Processing program itself is working well in the sense that cases that are filed with the additional fee are being adjudicated within the 15 calendar day time frame. However, this has come at an unacceptable cost in that normal, non-premium processing adjudications have dramatically suffered as a direct result of the allocation of scarce resources to Premium Processing adjudications.

When Premium Processing was first established, INS assured its customers that normal adjudications would not be adversely impacted and that Premium Processing would be a system that would only need to be used for unusually urgent matters. Instead, in our experience, Premium Processing is on its way to becoming a necessity in more and more cases as normal adjudication times for petitions such as H-1B extensions reach historic heights.

Sources: OIG Report on Premium Processing, AILA Infonet.