SEVIS Deadline Nears

With two days remaining until the deadline for U.S. institutions to begin using the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System to report information about all of their foreign students and scholars, colleges and universities across the country are rushing to enter data into the tracking system, while continuing to report system problems that have slowed compliance efforts during the past several months. NAFSA and its members welcome measures recently undertaken by the Department of Homeland Security to ensure that legitimate students who, through no fault of their own may encounter SEVIS-related problems at the port of entry, can enter the country. Concerns remain, however, about continuing technical glitches in the system and the absence of a plan to deal with the possibility of a system failure as the volume of data and users continue to increase.

Among the problems reported by SEVIS users recently:

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

While the recent announcement by DHS of a 24-7 "research and contact team" to assist impacted foreign students entering the country is encouraging, SEVIS users continue to report delays in getting responses from the SEVIS Help Desk. Wait times have been reported to stretch for days or weeks. Some data corrections have required 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/DHS 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 Associate Executive Director for Public Policy Victor Johnson. “Recent measures to address scenarios that might arise in connection with the August 1 deadline are an important step in the right direction, but DHS must also develop a a comprehensive plan for dealing with the situation that would arise in the event of a system failure.”

Regrettably, while schools face an August 1 deadline for entering SEVIS data, DHS has no deadline for correcting problems in the SEVIS system. The deadline notwithstanding, SEVIS remains plagued by systemic glitches. These need to be addressed. NAFSA renews its call, on an urgent basis, for DHS to take whatever steps are necessary to make SEVIS truly operational.