Labour has called on the Government to sort out problems at UK borders after a report revealed pressure to cut queues led to fewer checks.
Public spending watchdog the National Audit Office (NAO) found raised traffic during the London Olympics led to officials overlooking checks on guns and drug smuggling.
Staff shortages and the need to juggle passport checks with keeping queues down led to shortcuts on key duties such as checking for illegal goods.
Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper accused Home Secretary Theresa May of "reshuffling the deckchairs" on immigration and dodging the blame.
Yvette Cooper described the report as "shocking" She demanded details about how many times checks were stopped and the publication of an internal Home Office audit into the affair.
The NAO report found nearly 100% of passengers at the border received full passport checks in 2012-13.
More than 99% of European arrivals also cleared controls within the 25-minute target time.
But this success came at the expense of dealing with forgery detections, and seizures of cigarettes and counterfeit goods - which all came in below target.
Staff shortages mean key checks are not being carried out by officials Margaret Hodge, the chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said: "The Border Force did well to reduce queuing times both during and after the Olympics, but it is deeply worrying that this came at the expense of its other responsibilities, particularly customs.
"The Border Force must be able to check both goods and passengers at the same time - border security cannot be an 'either/or' choice."
Immigration Minister Mark Harper said the Home Office had inherited an organisation with "significant challenges".
"We have recruited more Border Force staff, established command centres to deploy those staff more flexibly and effectively and are reforming working practices," he said.
A fifth of the Border Force's 7,600 employees are employed under terms that restrict working hours to fixed periods during the week, stopping it from deploying its workforce flexibly.
At Heathrow this spring less than half the workforce was contractually obliged to work before 5am without being paid extra, despite a significant number of long-distance flights arriving at that time, the NAO said.
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