Ankur Sabharwal is the owner of immigration advisory Visa Matters. He is a licensed immigration adviser dealing with complex immigration matters.
OPINION: It’s easy to tell when Immigration New Zealand staff are working under pressure – the mistakes pile up.
Look at what’s happening with student visa applications right now.
Firstly, many people who lodged student visa applications before Christmas heard nothing from INZ until last month.
INZ is only now picking up these applications for the first time – these are people who need to begin studying within the next two weeks.
If you are outside New Zealand and your case officer finds something they don’t like about your application, they will spend a few minutes looking at your application, then send you a decline letter.
The decline letter often won’t tell you the real reason that you have been refused a visa.
Here’s an example.
One of my clients received a decline letter last week which told him that INZ didn’t accept that he had enough money to pay for his studies in New Zealand.
The letter said that “either” the applicant’s father had not provided sufficient evidence of required funds “or” the father did not meet one of INZ’s other requirements for a sponsor.
This vague kind of explanation is known as a “template decline letter”, and it is becoming more and more common. You read it, but you still don’t know why INZ is refusing a visa – it could be one reason, or it could be another.
This doesn’t meet INZ’s own guidelines, which require decision-makers to give actual reasons for a decision.
I have written previously about INZ’s practice of accepting documents at face value, without checking them.
Only 1% of visitor visa applications are checked by INZ verification officers, and 3% to 4% of Accredited Employer work visa applications are checked, INZ has told me previously.
Now that INZ is under pressure to decide applications, case officers take even more short-cuts.
One of my clients is applying for a work visa.
He received a letter last week saying that his overseas work experience evidence – pay slips, tax returns and an employment letter – were “not independently verifiable”, and so his case officer had decided they were unacceptable.
This means that the INZ case officer was not willing to check my client’s work experience documents with his employer or with the Indian tax department.
The other symptom of INZ working under pressure is that case officers make more mistakes.
Recently I received a letter from INZ incorrectly assessing my clients’ Parent Category resident visa application.
I explained repeatedly to the case officer the errors she was making in immigration law, but she ignored the points I was making and insisted she was right.
It was only after I took the matter to higher authorities that a technical adviser in the case officer’s own INZ branch intervened, accepting that I was correct and the case officer was wrong, which led to this Parent Category application being approved.
I haven’t received any apology from the case officer. Why didn’t she simply ask the technical adviser sitting nearby for his advice, rather than insisting that her incorrect opinion was the right one?
The officer advised that I could lodge a formal complaint if I was not happy with her response, so I have taken her up on her offer.
You can be sure that, if INZ is refusing visas without properly checking, it will also be approving visas without checking.
Last year, INZ issued hundreds of “Recovery work visas” with fake New Zealand job offers, without checking whether the job offers were genuine.
INZ was in a hurry then as well, because these were people who were meant to be helping with the clean-up after Cyclone Gabrielle in February.
One of my clients told me last week that he paid 900,000 rupees (about NZ$17,600) to an agent in India for a job offer which he discovered was fake after he arrived in New Zealand.
Last month, INZ sent him a letter saying he does not meet the character requirements for a further temporary visa because of the fake job offer that was submitted with his work visa application last year.
INZ is a soft target for scammers when it doesn’t check clients’ first visa applications.
It is too late once the clients are already in New Zealand – many will disappear into the black economy once INZ refuses their second visa application.
DISCLAIMER: This article does not constitute immigration advice. Individuals need to seek personal advice from a New Zealand licensed immigration adviser or lawyer to assess their unique situation. Ankur can be contacted at info@visamatters.co.nz.
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