New Zealand Immigration does not refund unprocessed visas

By Gill Bonnett of RNZ

Immigrants say they feel scammed after their visas were not processed and they received no refund.

Michael Hemmerde applied for residency in 2019 but lost his job as a manager at Auckland’s ASB Waterfront theater in August.

The Chilean applied for a refund to Immigration New Zealand (INZ) and was rejected two months later.

“They hadn’t even given me a case officer, nothing had happened to my file,” he said. “When you order something and don’t get a service, you’re expecting a refund for work that was never done on your file.

“They take your money, they put you in the queue, nothing happens, they keep the money and I never received the service I paid for.”

He’s back home but he’s still angry.

“To be very honest with you, I think what INZ is doing is a government-run scam.”

Qi Lishuang from China, who worked in hospitality on the South Island for four years, asked INZ what work had been done since applying for residency in December 2018.

“I’ve been waiting a year and a half and all of a sudden I got a case officer days after I submitted my claim for reimbursement,” he said. “They said ‘oh, your documents have been transferred from one building to another building in the same branch in Mānukau – your money is there now, you can’t get it back.’

“I just said this is completely theft, but it’s legal. Since you can’t say, they have the final say: ‘Sorry, no refunds.’

A partial refund for people who no longer meet the criteria after such a long delay, and the chaos that had caused Covid work, help them with their lives, he said.

She would use the money to pay for her early childhood retraining.

Immigration consultant Matt Simpson said refusal to refund when little had been done with applications was a matter of consumer affairs.

The government information he received showed it was done shortly before they were sent to a queue for up to two years.

“It has been evaluated in the [document] branch, and they have confirmed that all the information is there, then it has been filed at the branch to be ready to be assigned.

“There has been talk over the last 12 months about what happened with all these assignments and if because of immigration or the government. But the reality is that just have been sitting around doing nothing.”

Meanwhile, immigrants were also paying to renew work visas, which he described as money theft.

Included in the $ 2,700 to $ 3,300 fee is a tax of about $ 800, and he said that at least that should be refunded.

RNZ asked in an Official Information Law request how many people had requested refunds, but was told that would mean manually examining each person’s file.

Nearly 3,000 people had received refunds in the 12 months through September, more than in the previous three years combined, and for a total of nearly $ 1.4 million.

INZ said it worked on a cost recovery basis and that refunds were only granted in special circumstances.