Originally Posted by
elc2414
"As it is explained to me, all applications are sent to our background investigators in VT. They all get divided up amongst the workers there, and it gets done when it gets done. This is why two people who apply at the same time, at the same computer, with the same information, will have their applications approved at different times."
The way I would look at it is this: That most certainly does NOT explain why some people get approved long before others do even though they applied later. Makes no sense - if they are all done in the same office there shouldn't be "out of sequence" approvals. Unless they just have a bunch of goof offs in that office and very few people who are actually doing their job. <deleted by moderator>
There will always be
some amount of out-of-sequence conditional approvals, due to the variation in the amount and nature of background data present for each applicant. Also there will be some variation in the speed that each CBP person completes their review of each
similar type (i.e., I assume there is a range from easier to more difficult ones due to the amount of data to sift through, etc.) of application. Though a given set of fully trained and capable workers ought to be relatively similar in their task completion time, there will always be some individuals who are faster and some who are slower. Ideally management takes those and other factors into account.
If there is a
reasonably consistent distribution and management of workload, factoring in the known variables, then there shouldn't be too many wild swings in conditional decision times for
similar types of applications over the long run. That isn't to say that CBP needs to have consistent processing time as its goal per se, just that such large unpredictable variations
might be symptomatic of inefficiencies or randomness in their processes. (Of course the shutdown threw everything out of whack.)
And of course we don't know to what extent the data points in this thread are representative of the entire universe of applications, either. According to a 2014 CBP statistic cited in Wikipedia, about 50,000 applications are filed monthly on average. The quantity of unique data points in this thread is but a tiny fraction of the number of GE application filed since 2010 when this thread began. My gut feeling is that many others are seeing large disparities as well, but who knows.
But we'll never really know anything for sure, since we aren't informed as to the details of CBP's review processes. Ideally it would be nice to see more insight into the status of the application - maybe "application has been assigned to a reviewer (or whatever the title)..."reviewer has started working your application"...or similar. But that won't happen.