You know I've been pretty tough on USCIS about its fee increases and the technology problems that cause our adoption fingerprints to expire. But now, some of you will have a reason to cheer the technology at the agency.

On July 5, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, as the agency is formally known, launched a test of a Web-based information management tool to collect and process inter-country adoption applications. The new Secure Information Management Service, as USCIS is calling it, will be tested only in the Memphis and Newark offices of USCIS in the United States. It will also be tested in Frankfurt, Bangkok and Mexico City. (If you are so inclined, I picked up the news about this announcement from a blog focused on immigration law.)

While I know that some of you are filing adoption-related paperwork with your agency electronically now, that doesn't seem to be part of the new system test. The press release from USCIS indicates that prospective adoptive parents will continue to file all documents (the I-600A or I-600) and citizenship applications the old way, on paper. USCIS will then create individual customer accounts in the SIMS database. USCIS will turn them into electronic documents and store them in a centralized file that could be accessed by anyone--in the office participating in the trial only.

USCIS says that the new system was developed to support the agency's move away from "a paper-based filing system to a centralized and consolidated electronic environment"--which is definitely long overdue. The agency is clearly opening the door to the day when prospective parents will submit all information on their adoption plans in electronic format, though it doesn't say when that will be.

USCIS also doesn't say how long the initial trial will last, or when it will be rolled out to bigger USCIS offices in the U.S., or key adoption paperwork cities like Moscow, Beijing, Guatemala City and Addis Ababa. But it's at least nice to see the agency finally moving in the right direction.