United States Citizenship and Immigration Services' Employment-Based Fifth Preference (EB-5) Regional Center Program (OIG-14-19)

DHS OIG audit report OIG-14-19 (12 Dec 2013, 40 pages) on the EB-5 Regional Center Program: findings, four recommendations, Appendix A (scope), Appendix B (USCIS management comments of 4 Nov 2013, a scan with an imperfect text layer), contributors, distribution. Programme numbers: 325 approved regional centers at 1 Oct 2013 (already in the data); USCIS's unsupported cumulative figures since 1990 (more than $6.8 billion invested, at least 49,000 jobs); FY2012 regional center applications approved (35) and denied (63); 336 regional centers with I-924 filings in FY2010-FY2012; regional-center fees of $25,000-$50,000 per investor - all now extracted. Rule and timeline items added as events: 'pilot' dropped 3 Aug 2012, Form I-924 required from 2010, annual I-924A from 2011, policy memorandum 30 May 2013 (the report's own release is already an event). The opening of the Immigrant Investor Program Office (May 2013, Appendix B) is recorded as an event from usa-dhsoig-eb5-mayorkas-2015, which gives the exact day. The $500,000 / $1 million minimum investment is restated as background and is already in program_terms from the statute and regulations. Out of scope: single-case audit findings (12 of 15 files reviewed, a project 82% funded by US investors, a hotel costing about $28 million with $4.5 million of foreign money), audit sample sizes (15 regional center files, 6 investor files, 22 cases), and USCIS staffing (9 EB-5 staff in 2009, more than 80 in 2013, 7 then 9 economists, 22 economists). Rules restated from other sources are now recorded from this document too (decision 8).