• New York Sen. Charles Schumer expects an immigration reform bill by Labor Day, and hopes to get beyond the controversy over work visas.

• The Obama administration will go ahead with requiring federal contractors to use the E-Verify system to check employees’ status. It’s scrapping the Bush administration effort to make employers deal with workers who have mismatched Social Security numbers. A Senate amendment passed today seeks to overturn the Social Security decision.

• A new approach is under way to audit employers for compliance with immigration law. American Apparel is facing fines, and Krispy Kreme has agreed to pay a $40,000 fine stemming from a 2007 investigation. The new policy seems to be a shift away from raids in favor of checking companies’ paperwork.

• An annual Ombudsman report has a number of recommendations for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, including: Start scanning. The paper-based agency is embarking on a massive project to digitize its files, and the ombudsman had some advice on what to prioritize. Currently 50,000 case files are being scanned every month, but the agency started with files that won’t be as useful as others down the road, the report said. It recommended scanning green-card applications that will help speed the processing of future citizenship applications.

Helped by a lull in new applications, the agency is making progress in clearing its backlogs. Citizenship applications took about 11 months in New York in April 2008, and this year they take an average of eight months, according to the report.

The Nation of Immigrators blog follows up on other information in the report, including an array of customer service problems, and calls on the Ombudsman to dig deeper into further problems at not only USCIS, but ICE and Customs and Border Protection.