The New York Times reported last month that as deputy commissioner for operations, Mr. Chiseri did not have any prescribed role in the processing of applications from health care businesses.
The Justice Department is declining to bring charges against Lois Lerner, the former Internal Revenue Service official at the center of a political controversy over the processing of applications for tax-exempt status.
As Kathleen Clarke, the bureau's director, told a Congressional committee last fall, "The processing of applications for permits to drill and offering parcels of federal land for oil and gas leasing will be B.L.M.'s major priority".
And the processing of applications for disability benefits, a program of particular importance to people with low incomes, has been delayed because staff members aren't on hand to go through newly filed paperwork.
As the department's deputy commissioner for operations, he had no prescribed role in the processing of applications from health-care businesses, and was not generally known to lawyers and lobbyists in the state's health-care field.
The fees would allow the Food and Drug Administration to hire more reviewers to speed up the processing of applications to market new generics and reduce a large current backlog.
Since then, his Labor government has speeded up the processing of applications, reforming a regime where some had languished behind wire for years.
In the interview, he said: "Since most of these foreigners come to Calais to enter the UK, I want our British friends to now assume the processing of applications from those who want asylum, in a detention centre, in Britain, and also to assume the return of those who are rejected.
But most of the increase has been devoted to enforcement border patrols and detention of immigrants rather than to the processing of applications.
"There are many problems in the Spanish system," she says: Newcomers are not welcomed, there are long delays in the processing of applications, and many scientists become permanent staff only in their 40s.
