Jonathan "Jock" Scharfen, acting head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), talked with reporters this week in Atlanta about the challenges his agency faces and what he hopes to accomplish during his remaining seven months on the job.

Scharfen says his agency is working to reduce backlogs in citizenship applications and security checks. The ultimate solution is to modernize the paper-based bureaucracy and move it into the computer age.

Here are some problems facing the nation's immigration system and Scharfen's observations:

FBI NAME-CHECK DELAY

FBI background checks on immigrants have held up applications after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, sometimes for years. They have created a standing backlog of about 130,000 cases more than six months old at any time.

To deal with the backlog, Scharfen says the FBI and USCIS spent $35 million to hire 80 full-time workers and 220 contractors to look up the names in the FBI's paper files. All FBI name checks more than four years old have been cleared.

Scharfen says that by July, all cases more than two years old will be cleared; and by November, any case more than one year old will be cleared. By June 2009, the average processing time for FBI name check will be 30 days, he says. Cases that need more checking will be completed in 90 days.

CITIZENSHIP APPLICATION BACKLOG

USCIS received 1.4 million citizenship applications last year, swamping the agency and creating a huge backlog. Many immigrants hoped to beat last summer's steep hike in application fees; others were motivated by the heated national immigration debate. Earlier this year, USCIS estimated it would take an average of 18 months to process citizenship applications, up from the normal seven months.

Scharfen says his agency is hiring 1,600 workers to tackle the backlog. Processing times are expected to average about 10 months this year and eventually meet a five-month standard.

HELP US VISUALIZE OF THE NUMBER OF CITIZENSHIP APPLICATIONS LAST YEAR

"We had large sea-going containers," Scharfen says, "four of them, and they were filled with paper applications. We had to take those and receipt them."

IMMIGRATION REFORM

If Congress legalizes the approximately 12.5 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, can the USCIS handle it?

Yes, but the government will have to build an infrastructure to handle that many applications, Scharfen says. "We've asked our ombudsman to look and to do a study precisely on that, so when the new administration comes in, they'll have in hand an independent evaluation just on that issue as to whether we'd be able to handle that large influx of applications."

TELL ABOUT THE CONTRACT TO MODERNIZE THE AGENCY.

"We have a transformation contract that's going to be awarded, we hope, in August of this year," Scharfen says. "That contract is aimed at taking our agency from this old-fashioned way of doing business, this paper-based system, which is inefficient, expensive and doesn't allow us to do modern management techniques with it, or national security analysis ... to the modern electronic system and really to this century."

"We will want to make sure we have a good contract management team in place for that. We will be talking to both [presidential] campaigns to make sure they know about that contract. And we want to make sure that's in good shape, so when the new administration comes in, we're up and running and that contract is on the right track."