Two GAO reports from earlier this year show that USCIS's vaunted Premium Processing unit's services are subsidized by regular applicants who receive shoddy service. In other words the fees of regular applicants for USCIS's services are used to subsidize the cost of delivering faster services to premium processing applicants.

The first report "Immigration Application Fees"

http://www.ilw.com/immigdaily/news/2009,0713-imfees.pdf

is critical of USCIS's accounting and is worth a read for those interested in immigration fee issues, but the second is the gold mine - it is titled "Federal User Fees".

http://www.ilw.com/immigdaily/news/2009,0713-fedfees.pdf

Here are pertinent quotes from this document:

"the additional costs of premium processing services are funded by non-premium processing fee-paying applicants, raising equity concerns. Because USCIS has not identified the total costs of these services, the actual dollar amount being subsidized is unknown. (Federal User Fees at page 4; page 9 of 47 of the pdf file)"

"Further, Congress authorized USCIS to adjust the premium process fee according to the consumer price index but USCIS has not adjusted the fee since the fee's enactment. The additional collections that would result from an inflation adjustment could have been used to defray the costs of the premium processing service-currently born completely by non-premium processing customers-thereby limiting the amount of cross-subsidization by non-premium processing applicants.

(Federal User Fees at page 32; page 37 of 47 of the pdf file)"

USCIS's services are nothing to brag about, to put it mildly. On top of that, for the hundreds of thousands of regular applicants to find that their application fees are being used to process a minority of others' applications is adding insult to injury.

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