Serious Glitches, Errors Remain in Foreign Student Tracking System

Months after the deadline for U.S. institutions to begin using the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, and despite assurances from officials at the Department of Homeland Security that many of the system’s technical problems have been resolved, SEVIS users continue to report serious system problems that could jeopardize international educational exchanges, particularly the entering class of international students and scholars expected for fall 2003 enrollment.

Data Integrity Issues

SEVIS loses data that have been properly entered – sometimes numerous times – into the system. Data fields populated by school officials are reset or changed for no apparent reason. School officials are not authorized to correct certain errors in the system; they were advised by the SEVIS Help Desk to instead create new records, thus creating multiple files for a single student within SEVIS. Such situations bring into serious question the reliability and integrity of the data SEVIS currently contains. Erroneous data can impact directly on the legal status of thousands of international students and scholars in the United States.

Technical Bugs

SEVIS still contains bugs – discovered as users navigate the system – that impact on the ability of school officials to correctly report on their students. While the problem of "data bleeding" - cases in which forms or data generated at one school were discovered at a school in another part of the country - appears to have been corrected, users are still reporting instances of documents that print with incomplete information. In addition, some schools have found it technically impossible to process through SEVIS the transfer of a student from one school to another. When this happens, the transfer students is left without the necessary documents at the new school. Such technical problems have made tasks that INS estimated would take only minutes require hours – sometimes days or weeks – of staff time to complete. Even more worrisome to school officials, it is unclear what the impact of such errors may be on students who are legitimately enrolled but whose records are affected by technical glitches.

System Communication

SEVIS was intended to be a fully integrated electronic database, shared by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State. However, schools and students have not found this to be the case. Schools create records in SEVIS and generate admissions documents for students, as required, but some consular officers have reported to students who appear to apply for visas that they cannot find their records in the database and thus cannot process their visa applications. Such communication failures are already resulting in serious delays for prospective international students and scholars. Despite attempts by DHS to resolve this problem, current reports indicate that there continue to be many records missing from the consular database.

Support and Training

Users continue to report extensive delays in getting responses from the SEVIS Help Desk. Current wait times now often stretch for days or weeks. Records awaiting data corrections can require months. The need for Help Desk training continues to be evident. Help Desk staff often are unable to answer questions that require familiarity with immigration regulations. User reports also indicate that Help Desk staff have been unable, for example, to provide information about the status of transmissions by institutions that experience problems, or to advise users on how to correct errors or address glitches. In one case, the Help Desk reported to a school that a “catastrophic error” had occurred in a batch transmission, but could offer no information about how to correct the error. Given that batch transmissions can affect the records – and therefore the legal status – of hundreds of students at a time, this inability to effectively address errors is alarming. Training of immigration officials in the use of SEVIS – at ports of entry, the Help Desk, and regional service centers – remains inadequate.

Getting SEVIS Right

Because of the imposition of an arbitrary deadline for compliance, SEVIS was rushed into operation with very little testing. There was virtually no evaluation of the system’s capacity to sustain a high volume of use. SEVIS is therefore being “tested” as it is implemented, at the height of the summer travel and fall enrollment periods, and it is exhibiting serious problems.

“INS has done a very good job of implementing SEVIS, given the limitations imposed on it by a deadline that was not of its own choosing,” said NAFSA’s public policy director Victor Johnson. “But DHS must now take a step back and recognize that it is not enough to try to patch problems with the system as implementation progresses. A more comprehensive solution is needed.”

NAFSA has recommended instituting a grace period like the one previously declared by INS in January. This step would allow DHS to:

1. address the serious technical glitches and errors detailed above while permitting the use of pre-SEVIS forms and procedures in the interim so that schools can continue to process international admissions,
2. establish a means to ensure that after the August 1 deadline, students who are in legal status and schools that have made every attempt to comply with the law are not placed in jeopardy by technical problems and errors in SEVIS that have made it impossible to enter data into the system, and
   
3. comprehensively evaluate SEVIS and ensure that it is fully operational and ready for prime time.

Such a grace period need involve no loss of monitoring capability, because a transitional system required by the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002 gave the government the capacity to track students even before SEVIS became mandatory. This transitional system tracked admission document and visa issuance, entry into the United States, and appearance or nonappearance at the school for students and exchange visitors. Under the law, this transitional system was to remain in place until SEVIS was fully implemented. Since that condition obviously has not been achieved, DHS should reinstitute the transitional system and take the time to address the serious warning signs evident in SEVIS today.