Summary

Members of Congress asked GAO to analyze (1) the implications of any differences between the levels of cargo and passenger inspectors at certain airports and seaports around the United States and the levels determined by the U.S. Customs Service to be appropriate for these ports and (2) any differences among the cargo and passenger processing workload-to-inspector ratios at the selected ports and the rationales for any significant differences in these ratios. GAO could not perform the requested analyses because Customs has not assessed the level of appropriate staffing at its ports and because of concerns about the quality of Customs' workload data. In addition, Customs considered factors other than workload, such as budget constraints and legislative limitations, in determining its needs for inspectors and allocating them to ports. According to Customs officials, these factors must be considered in their decisionmaking in order to maximize the effectiveness of deployed resources. On the basis of statements from senior Customs officials and their responses to earlier GAO recommendations, GAO believes that Customs recognizes that staffing imbalances may exist at certain ports and that it needs to improve how it assesses the need for and allocates inspectors to ports of entry. GAO summarized this report in testimony before Congress; see: Customs Service: Inspectional Personnel and Workloads, by Norman J. Rabkin, Director of Administration of Justice Issues, before the Subcommittee on Government Management, Information and Technology, House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight. xxx/T-GGD-98-195, Aug. 14 (six pages).

GAO noted that: (1) it was not able to perform the requested analyses to identify the implications of differences between assessed and actual inspectional personnel levels because, as GAO reported in April 1998, Customs had not assessed the appropriate inspectional personnel levels for its ports; (2) in that report, GAO determined that Customs does not have a systematic agencywide process for assessing the need for inspectional personnel and allocating such personnel to commercial cargo ports; (3) Customs also does not have such a process for assessing the need for inspectional personnel to process land and sea passengers at ports; (4) while Customs uses a quantitative model to determine the need for additional inspectional personnel to process air passengers, the model is not intended to establish the level at which airports should be staffed, according to Customs officials; (5) Customs is in the early stages of responding to a recommendation in GAO's April 1998 report that it establish an inspectional personnel needs assessment and allocation process; (6) Customs officials GAO interviewed at air and sea ports told GAO that the current personnel levels, coupled with the use of overtime, enabled the ports to process commercial cargo and passengers within prescribed performance parameters; (7) the inspectional personnel data that GAO obtained for the selected ports showed that at the end of fiscal year 1997, the personnel levels at these ports were at or near the levels for which funds were provided to the ports; (8) GAO was also not able to perform the analyses to identify workload-to-inspector ratios and rationales for any differences in these ratios because it did not have a sufficient level of confidence in the quality of the workload data; (9) GAO identified significant discrepancies in the workload data it obtained from Customs headquarters, a Customs Management Center (CMC) and two ports; (10) data from the New York CMC indicated that these airports processed about 1.5 million formal entries alone, almost 100,000 entries more than the number headquarters had for all entries at these ports; (11) workload was only one of several factors considered by Customs in the few assessments--which focused on its drug smuggling initiatives--completed since 1995 to determine its needs for additional inspectional personnel and allocate such personnel to ports; and (12) Customs also considered factors such as the threat of drug smuggling, budgetary constraints, and legislative limitations.