I could tell you that in our audit we found very similar things: that at times the processing of newer applications occurred before older applications.
I do acknowledge that some applications might take time and that you can't necessarily always treat them in the order that they come in, but what was concerning for us was that the department wasn't doing that analysis along the lines of race, country of origin or country of residence. We felt that it was important for them to analyze whether there were differential outcomes and to try to address what they might be.
One of the causes we found was where files were routed for processing. Some offices are receiving workloads that don't match their employee complement.