New system for tracking students won't make deadline

WASHINGTON -- A new government system for tracking foreign students won't be completed on time, the Justice Department inspector general said Wednesday.

Inspector General Glenn Fine told a House Judiciary subcommittee that the Immigration and Naturalization Service will miss the congressionally mandated Jan. 30 deadline for the new Sevis system.

Sevis is an Internet-based system that allows the government to track foreign students. Three of the Sept. 11 hijackers held student visas, as did the man convicted of driving the van full of explosives into the World Trade Center in 1993.

While the computer system will be operating on time, INS will have not trained its own inspectors nor school officials, and will not have finished inspecting and recertifying colleges and technical schools to admit foreign students, Fine said. "The INS has made significant strides, yet we continue to believe that full implementation is unlikely by the deadline," Fine said.

Some gaps expected

INS deputy commissioner Janis Sposato said the system would be up and running by the deadline. But she acknowledged that some gaps would remain. For example, while colleges will have to enter background information on new foreign students by Jan. 30, they will have several more months before they have to supply the data on foreign students already enrolled at their institutions.

Under the system, colleges would supply detailed information on their foreign students, as would the State Department and Justice Department. This would make it easier to track students, and to revoke their visas and presumably deport them if they fail to complete their education.

Fine said INS needed to review the data and investigate possible fraud if the new system is going to work. "Enforcement to uncover school fraud historically has been a low priority at the INS," Fine said.

In addition, the INS plans to visit every college and trade school authorized to accept foreign students, but will not be able to check every institution by Jan. 30. The INS will begin at the lesser-known technical schools, Sposato said.

While the INS will hire outside inspectors to check these schools, Fine said the agency needs to set up a program to monitor the investigators and make sure they're properly reviewing the institutions.

Another problem is that INS has yet to issue the final rules for what colleges need to do to track their foreign students, said Terry Hartle, a senior vice president with the American Council on Education.

"To actually implement it, we have to have all the tools the regulatory guidance," Hartle said. "This is not a prescription for smooth implementation on campus."

Sposato said she expected the final rules to be issued by late fall, but they would be similar to the proposed regulations that have been publicized.

"The proposed reg is a very good clean road map of what the INS prepares to do," Sposato said.

"It is very uncomfortable for any organization or business to depend on preliminary regulations," Hartle said.