approved by the Attorney General, in consultation with the Secretary of Education and the Secretary of State. The section appropriated US$36,800,000 for the Department of Justice to implement section 641(a) of the IIRIRA. Machine readable passports The INA authorizes the U.S. Attorney General and Secretary of State to waive the visa requirement for aliens under certain circumstances Section 417 of the Patriot Act makes it a requirement of the Secretary of State to audit, and report to Congress on the results of the audit, the visa waiver program for each fiscal year until September 30, 2007, and also to check for the implementation of precautionary measures to prevent the counterfeiting and theft of passports as well as ascertain that countries designated under the visa waiver program have established a program to develop tamper-resistant passports. To qualify for the waiver, the INA specifies that the alien must have provided a valid machine-readable passport. However, from October 1, 2003 till September 30, 2007 this requirement is waived if the Secretary of State finds that the alien's home country is making progress toward ensuring that machine readable passports are generally available to its nationals, or is taking reasonable steps to protect against the misuse of non-machine readable passports. Prevention of consulate shopping The U.S. Secretary of State was required to determine whether consulate shopping was a problem, which is the practice of applying for visas at different consulate posts in the hope of finding one that will be more sympathetic to the applicant and thus approve the visa. Section 418 of the Patriot Act required the Secretary to report back to Congress if it was. No report was ever filed. Subtitle C--Preservation of immigration benefits for victims of terrorism Subtitle C was introduced by Senators John Conyers and Patrick Leahy as they recognised that some families, through no fault of their own, would either be ineligible for permanent residence in the United States due to being unable to make important deadlines because of the September 11 terrorist attacks, or had become ineligible to apply for special immigration status because their loved one died in the attacks. The legislation defines an "age-out" protection for children who are part of a petition for citizenship in that it allows those whose 21st birthday occurs in September 2001 and whose parents had applied for citizenship before September 11, 2001 to be defined as a child for 90