Determinating file order for adjuncting

[batallion9 50]

This is what a former USCIS employee said:

Q I always wondered about how many petitions each adjudicator has at once? Does each person lug a boxful to their desks, take an armful of 10 or 20, or what? Because most people with NOA1 from certain dates get approved, while a few are left hanging sooo long. I always imagined a stack of files on a slow pokes desk...

Thanks. There are storage shelves in each section of the building that house the boxes full of applicant's files. These shelves are continuously replenished as boxes are removed by the officers to be worked or turned in to be further processed after being approved. This resupply as it were is handled by the CIS contract employees.

So as a Adjudicator/officer I would go and get a box of case files every morning, scan/wand each file into the system under my user ID # (so people could track who had it) and then begin to adjudicate the cases. A box might hold 50 case or so.

They also had a rack for "expedites" which were cases whose petitioners had selected/paid for "premium processing". You were selected on a rotating basis to do "expedites". But the process was the same for these they just were staged differently in the overall que of things, so to speak. Moved further ahead in line or something. Congressionals were pulled by the congressional office and routed to the appropriate supervisor for dissemination to his employee's to work with a short turn around time.

So, your number of files vary at any given time during the day. Officers who did the work form home I spoke about earlier would come in to the office maybe once or twice a week, scan in all their new files (to their ID), then scan in all the approved files they were returning back into the system (from their ID) and take the multiple boxes back home with them to work. Enough to last a few days or so.

The reason for some hanging so long could be several. One could be an RFE and while the officer is waiting for the response he is working more current dates. In other words more and more applications are getting in front of the RFE'd application. Another reason could be that the boxes that are staged on the shelves are chosen at random by the officers. For some reason a box of files might sit longer on the shelf than another. Usually not more than a day at the most though. Or the officer could be hording a box at his desk (for some strange reason) and then goes on vacation and doesn't scan them out of his name and back into (return) them to the system so they can be picked up by someone else to work. So it sits for awhile.

Usually unless a file gets misplaced, applications are always kept in date groupings and date order. If you look in a box of files, they will all have been initially entered into the system either on the same day or within a day. That way they can work from oldest to newest in a organized fashion. They are kept that way so it will be fair to everyone waiting in line for approval.

On the rare occurrence a file will be mistakenly sent to district office or other Service Center, the error will be caught when a file search is done and it shows the location of the file (there is a system code showing its physical location). The file is recalled to its proper center or office. Very rare though.