Summary: Each year, U.S. citizens adopt between 7,000 and 10,000 foreign children for a variety of reasons--often because the prospective parents believe that they are ineligible for domestic adoptions and consider intercountry adoptions to be faster, easier, and less expensive adoptions. Once involved in the adoption process, however, some parents find the process to be complex, stressful, and difficult to complete. GAO found that the procedures of the U.S. agencies involved in such adoptions are reasonable and necessary. A GAO survey of parents and private adoption agencies who completed intercountry adoptions in 1991 disclosed that 70 percent of the parents were generally satisfied with the overall adoption process. GAO did find that the U.S. agencies did not administer some of their procedures efficiently--specifically, in processing the parents' fingerprints for background checks and in transmitting case data to overseas visa-issuing offices. These inefficiencies sometimes led to adoption processing delays.
