If your service organisation was found to have made incorrect or poor decisions between 20% and 40% of the time how worried would you be? In his recent report into the New Zealand Immigration Department that is just what the Auditor General found.
Some wag said a few years ago when The New Zealand Immigration Service changed its name to Immigration New Zealand that at least they were honest enough to own up and drop the word ‘Service’ from their name.
The good news, such as it is, is that the A.G is confident that New Zealand Immigration Service employees don't set out to screw up people's lives and are 'generally conscientious and honest’. But one of five decisions being wrong (at best) is hardly a positive reflection on those same conscientious and honest staff is it?
So how could it all have gone so wrong or has always been like this?
I am sorry to say it is the latter. It is quite clear after working with this Department for almost twenty years that their training is inadequate and these immigration officers are let loose on the public with a minimum of knowledge and it is therefore not unexpected that they cause havoc with peoples’ lives. The Department also employs many people not suited to the roles they have to fill, the negative culture surprises many a new officer and leads the best to move on after a short time (this Government Department has historically had the highest turnover rate of staff of around 22% per annum) and those that remain are often poisoned by the negativity that surrounds them. The culture is largely distrusting of migrants and their employers.
That sounds like a disservice to the few good officers that exist and it must be acknowledged that there are some.
However it is clear to those of us that deal with different Immigration Department branches all over the world that each region ends up with its own interpretation of the same rulebook. It has always been like this. For experienced licensed advisers like us we know which branch will process which case and can (because we have to) tailor it accordingly but it shouldn't be like that in a professionally run organisation. That of course is the point - after years of attempts to culture change, change management, new strategies, restructuring (upon restructuring), new logos and new starts nothing has fundamentally altered. Is that just the lot of the Immigration Department and can things ever really change?
The Immigration Minister, Jonathan Coleman says no! He does expect better and on his watch INZ will do better. I’ll wager that privately he won’t bet the family farm! Sadly, I heard the same thing from the last Minister, David Cunliffe. And from his predecessor and the Minister before that……. Government Departments are bigger than Ministers and while they (and the staff) probably mean well the entrenched culture is hard to shift. The last Government almost trebled the numbers of immigration officers over the past nine years and paid them more money than most could ever expect to earn in similar private sector positions. Nothing much has changed. It takes as long to get a visa or permit today as it did when I started in the business in 1989. So twelve Minister after I started we are seeing the same reports and complaints from its customers along with the same promises from Ministers.
The Auditor General says part of the problem is that Immigration officers make decisions too quickly in order to meet targets. That will come as something of a shock to the thousands of applicants and several hundred clients of mine currently sitting in so called ‘managed queues’ waiting for their cases to be even looked at. They think that the process moves too slowly, not too quickly. As do I.
Clearly, licensed advisers are part of the solution but only a part. This is a right of centre Government and they are on record as stating that more bureaucrats does not lead to better processes and decision making. Thankfully we now have a small number of senior officials inside the Department actively exploring how we as professional licensed advisers can assist the Department with efficiency gains. After all we know our stuff and have been tested by the Government and have the license to prove it. So shouldn’t our fully and correctly documented applications not be able to be processed more quickly simply because we overwhelmingly get it right first time?
In that way the Government would be able to use our knowledge, competence, compassion for our clients and ethics to work alongside officials to ensure that the embarrassment of the Auditor General’s report is at least to some degree mitigated. Our clients don’t have to worry about dealing with the Department directly (as tax payers using a tax agent do not do with the Inland Revenue Department) and the Immigration Department doesn’t have to deal directly with our clients who are largely and understandably clueless as to what the process is they are involved in and the criteria they are expected to evidence.
If only I believed that this might happen any time soon. If it was there might be less chance that the AG might end up writing another report like this one in another five years. I wouldn’t be betting the farm either.
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