One of the biggest accountability stories of the political year landed in a Parliament select committee room on Monday, when Immigration Minister Erica Stanford told MPs that her own officials had misled her and quietly steered a failing technology project away from Cabinet scrutiny. At least $32 million was written off when the project was finally killed, and the minister did not hold back about how it happened.
The project was the Biometric Capability Update, an eight year effort begun in 2018 to replace Immigration New Zealand’s ageing identity management platform. The old system leaned on a 2012 algorithm, was costly to run and forced large amounts of manual processing. A linked piece of work, the In Person Enrolment system, was meant to fix a biometric enrolment tool that kept failing and that officials warned posed risks at the border. Neither delivered. The budget crept from an original $35 million towards nearly $40 million by March 2024, and in November 2025 an acting chief executive recommended the whole thing be terminated.
What turned a familiar story of a blown IT budget into something far more serious was how officials at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment handled the bad news. According to the review Stanford presented, officials misrepresented an independent assurance check from September 2023, telling ministers it found the project sound and robust when the review had in fact flagged a poor delivery record and real doubts about whether it would ever be finished. When the budget pushed past the $35 million mark that would normally trigger Cabinet approval, officials used what Stanford described as creative accounting to split the costs and keep the project out of Cabinet’s view.
Stanford did not soften her language. She told the committee the behaviour was, in her words, as bad as it gets, and said she had lost confidence in the advice that officials give her. As the New Zealand Herald reported, she called the actions deliberate and co-ordinated, and said officials had admitted to the creative accounting. “It’s pretty galling to know in the background they were doing creative accounting to keep it out of Cabinet,” she said. She framed her own experience as almost deception by omission, describing a project whose troubled history was never properly laid out for her when she took the portfolio.
The independent review that underpins these findings was no light touch exercise. It worked through more than 400 documents and ran 43 interviews. It concluded the original business case was overly optimistic and insufficiently evidenced, that governance arrangements were put in place too late, that high staff turnover made everything worse, that completion dates were pushed back again and again, and that ministerial reporting was inconsistent and at times misleading. As recently as August 2025, officials were still telling ministers the system would be working within weeks.
MBIE’s current chief executive, Nic Blakeley, did not try to defend the indefensible. He accepted the ministry had fallen short of the Government and the public’s expectations, and told MPs the review had exposed integrity issues inside the organisation. He has promised a stocktake of every major technology project the ministry is running, along with stronger systems and independent assurance that those projects are being handled properly. A separate IT project will also be examined as part of that work.
A former chief executive, Carolyn Tremain, who became closely involved in the project in 2024, sent an apology letter acknowledging a clear mismatch between what officials understood and what was actually communicated to the minister. She said she had found no evidence of deliberate intent to mislead and attributed the incorrect summary of the assurance review to a relatively junior staffer, an explanation that sits awkwardly alongside the minister’s account of co-ordinated behaviour.
The matter is now headed for an independent integrity investigation. The Public Service Commission, under commissioner Sir Brian Roche, has appointed an investigator to examine how officials behaved and to recommend what should follow. The commission has signalled this is about more than one wasted project, saying the issues go to the core of the behaviours and ethics required of public servants. That is unusually blunt language from a body whose job is to hold the public service to its own standards.
For voters, the episode cuts in two directions at once. It is a reminder that ministers depend almost entirely on the honesty of the advice they receive, and that the safeguards meant to catch a runaway project can be sidestepped by the very people running it. It also lands in an election year, when how parties propose to spend, and to police that spending, is squarely on the ballot. New Zealanders heading to the polls in November can compare where the parties stand on accountability and public spending using Newswire’s voting tool.
What happens next will be a test of whether the consequences match the rhetoric. An integrity investigation, a ministry wide stocktake and a furious minister make for strong headlines, but the public will judge this on whether anyone is actually held to account and whether the next big government IT project is handled any better than the last.
What do you make of it? Should heads roll over the wasted millions, or is this just the cost of complex government technology? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
Leave a Reply