During our audit, what we found was that the department wasn't aware of the capacity of certain offices. While they knew there might have been chronic underfunding and a lack of resources in some offices, they continued to allocate files there based on the country of residence. That country of residence dictates where the application goes.
We compared two offices, one in Tanzania and one in Rome, and we found that the Tanzanian office had the same number of personnel but was receiving five times the workload. Back in 2016 the department committed to doing what it called “capacity-based allocation”, and we just weren't seeing that happen. They were not realizing that they couldn't keep sending files to Tanzania and that they should reallocate those to other places. That wasn't happening during our audit period, and that's an important element. Not reallocating them means that all of those files that go to that office will wait longer to be processed.