Filing and Retrieving Documents

All U.S. Residency Certification documents must be stored in an easily retrievable manner. The documents may be kept in date order, alphabetical order, or batch order.

The filed documents are to be separated into three categories:

Suspense

Closed

Foreign forms

All correspondence must be associated with the original application in suspense prior to working the case

Correspondence that has been researched, and the original application is closed, must be associated with the original application. Once associated, determine if the case needs to be reopened.

If the applicant correspondence responds to correspondence initiated by the U.S. Residency Certification unit, initiate a new case.

If the information provided indicates that an error may have occurred, or the information was needed during the processing of the original application, initiate a new case.

Correspondence that requires the reopening of a case as a new case must be processed using a new received date.

Circle out the original application received date using red or brown pencil.

Stamp the new received date on the document, using the correspondence received date.

Enter the correspondence received date as the received date.

USRC holds all cases that have been printed and mailed, or otherwise closed, until they are ready to go into record storage. We hold cases for:

6 months for cases with attached foreign claim forms, or

3 months for all other cases

To hold the cases, we purge them from their folders and stage them on the closed case walls on the third floor.