[Federal Register Volume 75, Number 56 (Wednesday, March 24, 2010)]
[Proposed Rules]
[Pages 14111-14116]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[FR Doc No: 2010-6490]
=======================================================================
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
DEPARTMENT OF STATE
22 CFR Part 22
[Public Notice: 6928]
RIN 1400-AC57 and 1400-AC58
Schedule of Fees for Consular Services, Department of State and
Overseas Embassies and Consulates
AGENCY: Department of State.
ACTION: Supplemental notice of proposed rulemaking.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
SUMMARY: The Department of State (``Department'') published two
proposed rules in the Federal Register on December 14, 2009, and
February 9, 2010, proposing to amend the Schedule of Fees for Consular
Services. In this supplemental proposed rule, the Department of State
is providing additional supplementary information regarding the Cost of
Survey Study (CoSS), the activity-based costing model that the
Department used to determine the fees for consular services proposed
in. The Department is also re-opening the comment periods on both
proposed rules for an additional 15 days.
DATES: Written comments must be received on or before 15 days from the
date of publication in the Federal Register.
[[Page 14112]]
ADDRESSES: Interested parties may submit comments by any of the
following methods:
Persons with access to the Internet may view this notice
and submit comments by going to the regulations.gov Web site at: http://www.regulations.gov/index.cfm.
Mail (paper, disk, or CD-ROM): U.S. Department of State,
Office of the Executive Director, Bureau of Consular Affairs, U.S.
Department of State, Suite H1001, 2401 E Street, NW., Washington, DC
20520.
E-mail: [email protected]. You must include the RIN (either
1400-AC57 or 1400-AC58, or both) in the subject line of your message.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Rob Kline, Office of the Comptroller,
Bureau of Consular Affairs, phone (202) 663-2513. E-mail:
[email protected].
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:
Background
The Department of State (``Department'') published two proposed
rules in the Federal Register on December 14, 2009 (74 FR 66076, Public
Notice 6851, RIN 1400-AC57), and on February 9, 2010 (75 FR 6321,
Public Notice 6887, RIN 1400-AC58), proposing to amend sections of part
22 of Title 22 of the Code of Federal Regulations, the Schedule of Fees
for Consular Services. The Department's proposed rules solicited
comments, and a number of comments requested additional detail on the
Consular Services Cost of Service Study (CoSS) as well as time to
comment on that detail. In response, the Department is providing the
additional written detail below.
Additional Detail on the Cost of Service Study
Activity-Based Costing Generally
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-25 states that it
is the objective of the United States Government to ``(a) ensure that
each service, sale, or use of Government goods or resources provided by
an agency to specific recipients be self-sustaining; [and] (b) promote
efficient allocation of the Nation's resources by establishing charges
for special benefits provided to the recipient that are at least as
great as costs to the Government of providing the special benefits * *
*.'' OMB Circular A-25, ] 5(a)-(b); see also 31 U.S.C. 9701(b)(2)(A)
(agency ``may prescribe regulations establishing the charge for a
service or thing of value provided by the agency * * * based on * * *
the costs to the Government * * *.''). To set prices that are ``self-
sustaining,'' the Department must determine the true cost of providing
consular services. Following guidance provided in Statement 4
of OMB's Statement of Federal Accounting Standards (SFFAS), available
at http://www.fasab.gov/pdffiles/sffas-4.pdf, the Department chose to
develop and use an activity-based costing (ABC) model to determine the
true cost of the services listed in its Schedule of Fees, both those
whose fee the Department proposes to change, as well as those whose fee
will remain unchanged from prior years. The Department refers to the
specific ABC model that underpins the proposed fees in the above-
referenced rules as the ``Cost of Service Study'' or ``CoSS.''
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) defines activity-based
costing as a ``set of accounting methods used to identify and describe
costs and required resources for activities within processes.'' Because
an organization can use the same staff and resources (computer
equipment, production facilities, etc.) to produce multiple products or
services, ABC models seek to precisely identify and assign costs to
processes and activities and then to individual products and services
through the identification of key cost drivers referred to as
``resource drivers'' and ``activity drivers.''
Example: Imagine a government agency that has a single facility
it uses to prepare and issue a single product--a driver's license.
In this simple scenario, every cost associated with that facility
(the salaries of employees, the electricity to power the computer
terminals, the cost of a blank driver's license, etc.) can be
attributed directly to the cost of producing that single item. If
that agency wants to ensure that it is charging a ``self-
sustaining'' price for driver's licenses, it only has to divide its
total costs for a given time period by an estimate of the number of
driver's licenses to be produced during that same time period.
However, if that agency issues multiple products (driver's
licenses, non-driver ID cards, etc.), has employees that work on
other activities besides licenses (for example, accepting payment
for traffic tickets), and operates out of multiple facilities it
shares with other agencies, it becomes much more complex for the
agency to determine exactly how much it costs to produce any single
product. In those instances, the agency would need to know what
percent of time its employees spend on each service and how much of
its overhead (rent, utilities, facilities maintenance, etc.) are
consumed in delivering each service to determine the cost of
producing each of its various products--the driver's license, the
non-driver ID card, etc. Using an ABC model would allow the agency
to develop those costs.
Components of Activity-Based Costing
As noted in SFFAS Statement 4, ``activity-based costing
has gained broad acceptance by manufacturing and service industries as
an effective managerial tool.'' SSFAS Statement 4, ] 147.
There are no ``off-the-shelf'' ABC models that allow the Department (or
any other entity) to simply populate a few data points and generate an
answer. ABC models require financial and accounting analysis and
modeling skills combined with a detailed understanding of all the
organization's business processes, which, in an entity the size of the
Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs, are exceedingly complex. More
specifically, ABC models require an organization to:
Identify all of the activities that are required to
produce a particular product or service (``activities'');
Identify all of the resources consumed (costs) in the
course of producing that product or service (``resources'');
Measure the quantity of resources consumed (``resource
driver''); and
Measure the frequency and intensity of demand placed on
activities to produce services (``activity driver'').
For more information, SFFAS Statement 4 provides a
detailed discussion of the use of cost accounting by the U.S.
Government.
Example: To consume a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a
person might engage in multiple activities: grocery shopping,
sandwich making, sandwich eating, and kitchen cleaning. Each of
these activities consumes resources: grocery shopping, for example,
requires gas to drive to the store, time to make the trip, and money
to buy the peanut butter, jelly, and bread. A person might be able
to make 25 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with a single jar of
peanut butter; as a result, the resource driver for peanut butter
would be 1/25th of a jar of peanut butter. If a person chooses to
eat two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at a meal, the activity
driver for ``kitchen cleaning'' would be \1/2\ since the person
would eat two sandwiches, but only have to clean the kitchen once.
Although the Department has used a sophisticated and detailed ABC
model to set fees for a number of years, in its October 10, 2007,
report ``Transparent Cost Estimates Needed to Support Passport
Execution Fee Decisions,'' available at http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-08-63, the GAO asked the Department to expand the sophistication of
its cost model by identifying even more discrete activities and
modeling a broader array of products and services. To provide this
additional detail, the Department launched a multi-year plan to refine
the CoSS with the help of a team of experienced outside consultants led
by The QED Group, LLC, and including Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc. as a
[[Page 14113]]
subcontractor. The consultant team was made up of experts in cost
modeling capable of providing an objective, outside assessment of
costs.
Consular Service Activities
Working with its consultants, the Department reviewed all of its
consular operations and identified 262 distinct activities--including
77 visa-specific activities, 11 passport-specific activities, 58
activities specific to overseas citizen services, and 116 cross-cutting
activities (such as cashiering, fraud prevention, and public affairs
outreach). This list includes more than five times as many activities
than the Department's cost model from the prior CoSS, which broke out
52 activities. The Department provides the following examples of some
of the activities that make up a consular operation to illustrate the
substantial complexity that the CoSS must be capable of taking into
account:
Processing a passport book (Items 1, 2a/2b, and 2g of the
proposed Schedule of Fees). Fifty-two separate CoSS activities are
required to process a first-time application for a passport book,
including the following actions:
--Public outreach, such as maintaining passport information on the
Department's Web site (http://travel.state.gov) and operating
appointment systems for our passport agencies;
--Answering phone and written inquiries from the public regarding
passport rules and pending applications;
--Nine separate activities related to data entry of applications, from
capturing applicant photos and processing payment to supervisor audits
of the process;
--Investigation of and coordination with federal law enforcement on
potentially fraudulent applications;
--Actual adjudication of the application;
--Production of the personalized passport itself; and
--Archiving completed applications for future reference.
Adding additional visa pages to a passport (Item 2c of the
proposed Schedule of Fees). Among the 51 activities involved in adding
additional pages to a passport are the following:
--Receiving the application and entering data from it into the system;
--Performing a name check for the applicant and reviewing the results
to determine if there any legal impediments to providing the service,
such as an outstanding federal warrant for the applicant's arrest;
--Physically affixing the pages to the passport; and
--Auditing of the process by a supervisor.
Processing a non-petition-based machine-readable
nonimmigrant visa (MRV) (Item 21a of the proposed schedule of fees).
Ninety-nine CoSS activities are required in processing an application
for a non-petition-based MRV, such as a tourist visa, including:
--Public outreach, such as responding to public inquiries as to the
status of MRV applications;
--Conducting an interview of the MRV applicant;
--Collecting biometrics from the MRV applicant;
--Actual adjudication of the application;
--Requesting advisory opinions from attorneys at headquarters regarding
how specific laws and regulations apply to complicated applications;
--Requesting security advisory opinions from headquarters about
applicants the consular officer believes may present a risk to U.S.
national security;
--Investigating possible fraud in those applications; and
--Producing the actual, physical visa, affixing it to the applicant's
passport, and returning that product to the applicant.
Processing a fianc[eacute](e) (K category) MRV (Item 21d).
One hundred and three CoSS activities are required to process an
application for a K1-category fianc[eacute](e) nonimmigrant visa,
including:
--Pre-processing of the case at the National Visa Center, where the
petition is received from the Department of Homeland Security, packaged
and assigned to the appropriate embassy or consulate; and
--Intake and review of materials required for a K visa that are not
required for other nonimmigrant visas, such as the I-134 affidavit of
support and the DS-2054 medical examination report;
--Conducting an interview of the K visa applicant;
--Collecting biometrics from the K visa applicant;
--Actual adjudication of the application;
--Requesting legal opinions from headquarters as necessary;
--Investigating possible fraud in those applications; and
--Producing the physical visa, affixing it to the applicant's passport,
and returning that product to the applicant.
Processing a letter rogatory (Item 51). Sixty CoSS
activities are required to service a request for a letter rogatory,
covering actions including:
--Receipt of the request at headquarters and dispatch of a telegram to
an embassy or consulate instructing that the service be initiated;
--Preparation of a diplomatic note to be sent to the appropriate
foreign government; and
--Monitoring the case as it progresses through foreign government
channels, and regularly updating the customer on the status of the
case.
By taking the 52 activities from the prior CoSS and breaking them
down further into 262 activities in the current CoSS, the Department
was able to model its costs much more precisely. As a result, the
Department was able to identify differences in both resource drivers
and activity drivers that had previously been obscured. For example,
the Department has better data now on how much additional time a
consular officer spends on reviewing the case file for a K
fianc[eacute](e) visa (resource driver) as well as how much more
frequently an officer seeks assistance from fraud prevention resources
as part of a K visa application (activity driver) compared to a
standard tourist visa application. Not surprisingly, this additional
detail has dramatically increased the complexity of the CoSS because
the Department now matches costs with activities at a more granular
level.
Determining the Cost of Performing Each Consular Activity
After defining each activity, the Department used the CoSS model to
determine the total costs to perform that activity. As noted in SFFAS
Statement 4, ``[d]epending on feasibility and cost-benefit
considerations, resource costs may be assigned to activities in three
ways: (a) Direct tracing; (b) estimation based on surveys, interviews,
or statistical sampling; or (c) allocations.'' SSFAS Statement
4, ] 149(2).
Direct trace costs are quite obvious and easy to identify. For the
activities listed above they include, for example, what the Department
pays for each physical passport book, the paper affixed to the book of
a customer who requests additional pages, or the visa foil that is
placed into an applicant's passport.
Determining how to assign other types of costs to activities is
much more difficult than direct trace costs since an employee or
resource may be involved in many different activities or processes. To
give a few examples from among the large number of factors that go into
determining ``assigned costs'' for the scores of consular services,
such costs would include how much time a passport specialist spent to
adjudicate a particular passport application; how
[[Page 14114]]
much time a passport agency employee spent processing payment for a
passport; how much time another employee spent performing a quality-
control check on this and other passport work; how much time a consular
officer at an embassy or consulate spent interviewing a visa applicant,
and another employee spent taking the applicant's fingerprints; how
much time that officer then spent adjudicating the visa application;
how much time the fraud unit spent investigating whether bank documents
submitted in a visa application are fraudulent; and how much time legal
staff at headquarters spent determining whether an individual's claim
to citizenship is adequately documented.
Finally, the third set of costs, allocated costs, is neither
obvious nor easy to trace. With assigned costs, the entire amount is
counted as a consular cost and the decision is what share of that cost
should be assigned to what activity. In determining allocated costs,
only a portion of the whole are included in the model because only that
portion can be assigned to consular activities. One example of this is
the Department's Bureau of Human Resources, which provides services to
all of the Department. The CoSS model includes only a portion of that
Bureau's costs, based on the percentage of Department employees who
perform consular work. To provide another example, when considering the
cost to keep a particular facility (embassy, consulate, passport
agency, etc.) functioning, the Department first determined what portion
of that facility is used to provide consular services, and then
allocated within the CoSS model how much of that smaller amount should
be charged to the activities associated with providing a given customer
with a given service--such as a passport or a nonimmigrant visa--at
that location.
The Department estimates that, on the whole, 19.6% of its consular
costs are direct trace, 60.7% are assigned costs, and the remaining
19.7% are allocated costs, although the exact breakdown of these costs
varies by activity. Given that such a high percentage of the
Department's costs are assigned or allocated costs, the Department
devoted substantial efforts to modeling these costs.
Assigning Costs
To assign labor costs, the Department relied on a variety of
industry standard estimation methodologies. For example, the Department
analyzed passport agency task reports to determine how much time
passport specialists working at a passport agency devote to particular
tasks--for example, time spent serving customers in the window versus
time spent in training or performing administrative duties versus time
spent actually adjudicating passports. To estimate how much time
consular officers overseas spend on consular activities, the Department
asked consular officers at 200 overseas posts to complete a 98-question
survey. This survey asked Consular Affairs personnel to break out the
time they spend on each consular activity they perform during a typical
month--visa interviews, visa adjudication, passport adjudication,
performing welfare and whereabouts visits, responding to judicial
assistance requests from American citizens abroad, notarizing documents
for American citizens abroad, issuing consular reports of birth abroad,
and so forth. The responses to the survey were then used to develop
resource drivers to assign labor costs to activities. To give one
example, in the survey responses, foreign service national (FSN)
employees in Mumbai, India, indicated that as a whole they spent 6,586
hours on consular activities in a typical month, of which 955 hours
(14.5% of their time) were spent on performing nonimmigrant visa
application intake. Total annual compensation for Mumbai FSNs was
$783,988. Based on the percentage calculated above, 14.5% of their
compensation, or $113,678, was calculated as the cost of this one
activity for this one post for this one labor category.
To assign activity costs to the individual services, the Department
extracted volume data by product type from its data systems. For
example, to determine how to assign the costs of adjudicating
nonimmigrant visas, the Department analyzed the volume of nonimmigrant
visas issued by category (B, H, K, L, and so forth) for a given time
period, which in turn became the activity driver for this data. For
activities at embassies and consulates abroad, this volume data is
collected from the ``Consular Package'' every consular section submits
annually via the Internet-based Consular Workload Statistics System
(CWSS). For more than 30 years, the Consular Package has been the
single most important document consular managers use to report, plan,
and budget for consular operations, and is the key document linking
consular objectives to resource and personnel requirements. CWSS
collects and evaluates data from 239 individual consular sections in
consulates and embassies worldwide, and provides customizable reports
of available data. CWSS is designed to provide the most comprehensive
picture of each post's consular operations and cumulatively of
embassies and consulates by region and worldwide. It provides an
overview of the volume and nature of the embassy's or consulate's
consular workload; personnel and work hours devoted to it; the
challenges faced; and the outlook for the future. These reports yield a
wealth of data and are an exceptionally valuable management tool for
determining consular resource needs. Volume data for all consular
services the Department provides at its embassies and consulates
overseas--passport and citizenship services, emergency services to
American citizens, nonimmigrant and immigrant visa services, judicial
services, etc.--is captured from the CWSS. Using the Mumbai example
above, the costs for the processing of nonimmigrant visa application
intake activity were assigned to nonimmigrant visas according to volume
by visa category, as collected from the CWSS--an activity driver
referred to as ``nonimmigrant visa applications.'' Of the 253,394
nonimmigrant visas issued in Mumbai during FY 2008, 209,120 (82.5%) of
them were ``base MRVs,'' that is non-petition-based nonimmigrant visas
(excluding the E category). Thus, 82.5% of the FSN costs for this
activity ($93,784 of the $113,678 total) were assigned to ``base MRVs''
for this one cost element.
For consular activities that take place in the United States, the
Department collects volume data from periodic workload reports
pertaining to the passport or visa facilities in question. For example,
for volume data on the processing of passport applications or requests
for additional pages submitted to one of the many passport agencies in
cities across the United States, the Department collects volume data
from monthly workload reports pulled from the passport management
information system, a management database.
After collecting and analyzing all available cost and workload
data, the Department converted this raw data into resource drivers and
activity drivers for each resource and activity. The resulting 14-
gigabyte database constitutes the CoSS model. Because the CoSS is a
complex series of iterative computer processes incorporating more than
a million calculations, it cannot itself be reduced to a tangible form
such as a document, notwithstanding the use of the word ``study'' in
the term ``cost of service study.''
The final component required to determine unit costs is ``scenario
planning,'' described in the following section.
[[Page 14115]]
Scenario Planning
Scenario planning allowed the Department to predict levels of
future demand for specific services and evaluated their impact on unit
costs. Without scenario planning, an activity-based costing model can
only determine historical costs, or how much it cost to produce
something in the past. As there is no mechanism for the Department to
charge retroactive fees to recipients of prior services, and in
accordance with OMB objectives, the Department endeavors to determine a
``self-sustaining'' price for future service delivery. OMB Circular A-
25, ] 5(a). Through scenario planning, the Department can convert
historical data about service costs into forward-looking estimates of
how much a service will cost in the future.
Private industry has significantly greater flexibility in altering
its personnel and overhead costs based on changes in demand than do
government agencies. As roughly 70% of the workforce involved in
providing consular services are full-time federal employees, if demand
for a service falls precipitously, the Department cannot shed employees
as quickly as the private sector. (For that matter, should demand rise
precipitously, the Department cannot add employees as quickly, since
delivering the vast majority of consular services requires specially
trained employees, and these persons cannot begin their training until
they have completed the federal hiring process and passed a security
clearance.) Additionally, given government procurement rules and
security requirements, the Department commits to many of its facilities
and infrastructure costs years before a facility comes online. Even if
demand changes, the Department is still obligated to cover these costs.
As a result, when setting fees, the Department must assume that the
majority of its short-term costs cannot drop significantly. Given these
and other constraints on altering the Department's cost structure in
the short term, changes in service volumes can have dramatic effects on
whether a fee is ``self-sustaining,'' and forecasting demand becomes
crucial.
Example: In the original example above involving the issuance
of driver's licenses, assume that the agency is obligated to spend
$1 million per year on staff and facilities costs regardless of how
many applicants apply for a driver's license. If that agency
believes 100,000 people will apply for a driver's license next year,
then charging $10 for each driver's license would be a ``self-
sustaining'' fee. However, if only 75,000 people actually applied
for a $10 driver's license, the agency would face a $250,000 budget
shortfall (or 25% of its total budget). If the agency had known in
advance that demand was more likely to be 75,000 people in the next
year, it could have set a self-sustaining price of $13.33 for each
license.
The Department devotes significant internal resources to monitoring
current demand for consular services and forecasting future demand.
After reviewing its own historical data and conferring with its CoSS
consultants from the team led by The QED Group, the Department
developed a range of demand scenarios for each service or product that
it ran through its model. From this range, the Department deliberated
and, based on historical demand and experience, chose the most likely
demand scenario for each service or product. It then used this demand
scenario to populate the final version of the CoSS.
These estimates took into account, among other factors, the likely
impact of the global economic downturn on demand for consular services.
Using the activities listed above as examples, the Department
forecasted that it will receive in FY 2010:
--A total of 13,618,092 applications for passport products, an 18.5%
decrease from actual figures in FY 2008, the last full year available
to the Department at the time it modeled the fees proposed in the rules
at issue in this notice, and a year in which impending Western
Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) implementation resulted in very
high demand;
--217,576 applications for extra passport pages, a 5.3% decrease from
FY 2008 due to the post-WHTI decrease in overall demand for passport
products;
--5,787,040 applications for nonimmigrant visas that do not require a
petition, a 10.6% decrease from FY 2008 due to the addition of eight
countries to the Visa Waiver Program and the effects of the global
economic downturn;
--98,077 applications for K1-category fianc[eacute](e) visas, a 10.7%
decrease from FY 2008 due to the decrease in overall demand for visas
resulting from the global economic downturn;
--543 requests for processing of letters rogatory and Foreign Sovereign
Immunities Act (FSIA) judicial assistance cases, a 20.9% increase from
FY 2008 based on the historical rates of increase for judicial services
requests.
Running the Data Through the CoSS Model
The costs the Department entered into the CoSS model included every
line item of costs for the Department, including items such as physical
material for making passports and visas, salaries, rent, supplies,
travel, and so forth. The Department then determined a resource driver
(from, for example, the responses to the overseas survey, data from the
passport agency task report, etc.) for each of these costs, as
discussed in the ``Assigning Costs'' section above, and entered the
resource drivers and assignments into the model. This allowed the model
to calculate the activity cost for each activity. The Department then
selected an activity driver, such as the volume data from CWSS
discussed above, for each activity, in order to assign these costs to
each service type. This process allowed the model to calculate a total
cost for each of the Schedule of Fees' line items for visa services,
passport services, and overseas citizen services. The model then
divided this total cost by the total volume of the service or product
in question in order to determine a final unit cost for the service or
product for the historical base year. Projected cost increases for
predictive years were also included to take account of changes inter
alia in the size of consular staff, the exchange rates, inflation, and
cost of living factors. At this stage, the final demand projections
discussed in the ``Scenario Planning'' section above were applied to
each appropriate element in the model using business rules that allowed
the model to project unit costs for future years. The calculation of
these costs allowed the Department to determine the appropriate fee to
propose. As this series of calculations demonstrates, the CoSS is an
extremely complex yet comprehensive model that captures historical
costs while attempting to predict future costs based on the
Department's best knowledge and predictive abilities.
Conclusion
Based on the information outlined and explained above, the
Department believes these fees are entirely consistent with the
objective in OMB Circular A-25 to ``promote efficient allocation of the
Nation's resources by establishing charges for special benefits
provided to the recipient that are at least as great as costs to the
Government of providing the special benefits * * *.'' OMB Circular A-
25, ] 5(b). The Department takes seriously its obligation to be a good
steward of public resources (including user fees) and
[[Page 14116]]
understands clearly the important role it plays in encouraging and
enabling international trade and commerce.
As noted above, the Department determined its proposed fees using a
federally approved fee-setting model--activity-based costing--developed
with the assistance of independent professional consultants experienced
in activity-based cost modeling, and believes that these proposed fees
will be self-sustaining when implemented. Moreover, the Department
continues to refine and update the CoSS so it can regularly monitor its
fees and make adjustments as required to continue to set fees
commensurate with what it costs the Department to provide the service
in question.
Dated: March 18, 2010.
Patrick F. Kennedy,
Under Secretary of State for Management, Department of State.
[FR Doc. 2010-6490 Filed 3-23-10; 8:45 am]
BILLING CODE 4710-06-P