Reston, Virginia - March 2006

Tom Shea, Vice President of Corporate Development, announced that CSC and XPAND Corporation have joined together in a team relationship to support a key aspect of the Department of State’s Visa Information Services initiative. The CSC / XPAND Team will design, develop and launch a unique web-based application that will be used to populate and generate the DS-156 Visa application form. Initially the application called EVAF for Electronic Visa Application Forms will be made available at several US Embassies and in the future has the potential of being installed at other Embassies throughout the world.

Presently several forms are provided by the Department of State for specific personal information that will be used to process an individuals’ application. The primary form that is used is the DS-156. Presently the only means to access and complete these forms is performed by printing off a hard copy of the form and filling in the information by hand. A second alternative is to attempt to complete the desired form using the allowed capabilities of the Interactive PDF software. The Interactive PDF allows an individual to enter information onto a form without any editing or retention capabilities. The greatest majority of applicants are not familiar with using the interactive PDF software and this causes a great deal of wasted time, end-user frustrations and support by Embassy and Call Center personnel. The common desire was to be able to accomplish this form completion programmatically; however, the secured PDF structure does not easily allow this objective to be met. With the directive to move more of the application completion and scheduling to a web-based application at each Embassy, the present inability to populate these forms is restricting progress.

The eGovForms™ gateway with EVAF will permit authorized external visa appointment scheduling sites, such as VisaPoint, to connect to the EVAF application by a secured, encrypted connection that will be activated when the visa applicant clicks on a hyperlink on the visa appointment scheduling site. Where EVAF has been installed there has been a marked reduction in customer support calls and an improvement in the quality of information that is being provided to Embassy personnel.