Immigration New Zealand's ADEPT system auto-approved visas without human review, as $336m IT project faces scrutiny

HouGarden New Zealand, 30 September — The faults were discovered last year inside ADEPT, a system that forms part of Immigration New Zealand's (INZ) $336 million Our Future Services IT programme. That programme is now under cabinet-ordered review after officials found its projected savings had been overstated by $134 million.

In total, 23 Job Check applications — a mandatory step in the Accredited Employer Work Visa (AEWV) pathway that verifies whether a role genuinely needs to be filled by a migrant worker — were approved without manual assessment between February and November 2022. A further 32 visitor visa applications were green-lighted in the same automated fashion over the preceding three years.

INZ notified Immigration Minister Erica Stanford of the problem. In a statement to her office, the agency said: "Immediate action was taken to investigate the cause, and a full sweep conducted to identify any other cases."

The agency said automated decision-making had already been enabled in law, but INZ had not yet activated that power. The unintended approvals occurred because of a technical fault in the workflow logic. INZ online services director Katy MacLeod explained: "In the affected cases, applications were able to continue through the workflow, allowing an application to move past the manual assessment stage before that assessment had been completed."

MacLeod added: "The issue was caused by a technical fault that, in some cases, allowed the same automated process to run more than once on a visa application, leading to unexpected duplication of actions and a bypass of manual assessment."

INZ said its Technical Advisors reviewed all 32 auto-approved visitor visa applications. Twenty of those visas had already been used for travel to New Zealand, with no adverse outcome recorded. However, six applications were reopened for full assessment because of high-risk factors, and one of those was recommended for decline.

A software fix took two months to deploy. INZ noted that "previous attempts to deploy the fix earlier in October were complicated by wider Microsoft issues." The agency said the system was being closely monitored to prevent a recurrence.

INZ has previously stated that only immigration officers hold the authority to decide on rejecting a visa application.

The auto-approval fault is not the only problem to have emerged in ADEPT. Last month, an unknown number of tourists hoping to visit New Zealand were unable to submit visitor visa applications following a system update on 23 August. MacLeod said the issue affected draft applications for tourism or holidays where a secondary applicant had already been added before the update, preventing submission. INZ put interim measures in place to support affected applicants, and a permanent fix was applied on 26 August.

A separate glitch last year affected employers using AEWV job tokens, involving approximately 2,300 businesses whose accreditation had expired and been renewed. The fault meant employers could not resend a job token to a migrant worker or notify INZ that a worker had left their employment, because those workers no longer appeared on their ADEPT employer dashboard. Officials told Stanford: "When the fix was developed, it was also identified that a data clean-up would be needed for employers who had a gap in their accreditation before the fix." That fix was applied in March last year.

Two months after that, staff identified a further problem affecting parent and grandparent multiple-entry visitor visa applicants. In total, 364 applicants were not asked whether they had lived in a country with a high incidence of tuberculosis (TB) since they last submitted a clear chest X-ray to INZ. Of those 364 people, 295 were granted visas. A further 21 applicants were not asked to provide a chest X-ray despite having declared they had spent more than six months in a TB high-incidence country.

Stanford was told: "Their individual risk of currently having TB is still relatively low." INZ said it intended to contact those applicants and request that they seek medical advice if they had, or were to develop, symptoms consistent with TB. The issue is particularly relevant for applicants from countries where TB rates are elevated, and INZ said screening requirements exist precisely to manage that risk.

Applicants currently holding or applying for visitor visas, parent and grandparent multiple-entry visitor visas, or Accredited Employer Work Visas are among those directly affected by these system errors and may wish to confirm the status of their own applications with INZ.

The broader context is the future of the Our Future Services programme itself. Cabinet directed INZ's parent agency, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), earlier this month to prepare a new business case for the programme. Our Future Services had originally promised $453 million in savings over its lifetime, but on current estimates, if it proceeds, it would cost the government money rather than save it. Approximately $25 million was spent in the programme's first year.

Ministers have asked MBIE to report back before April next year, reassessing the programme's strategic case for change, its finances, and future delivery frameworks. No decision to halt or continue the programme has yet been made.