Immigration Minister Erica Stanford has handed two conflicting reports about a failed border technology project to the inquiry examining how her own ministry handled it, after finding that the version given to her made no mention of a cost blowout that an earlier version sent to her predecessor had set out in detail.
RNZ reported on Friday morning that Stanford released the two documents, both weekly updates on the now abandoned Biometric Capability Upgrade covering the same period in August 2023. One went to the immigration minister of the day, Andrew Little. The other, summarising the same week, was provided to Stanford in March 2024 after her office asked for all advice and documents relating to the project.
The 2023 update sent to Little recorded that the project had passed a major milestone, but said the planned go live date of mid November 2023 was no longer realistic and proposed a new date of March 2024. It went further than that. According to the documents released to RNZ, the report said delays and a review of the whole of life cost meant “the budget will now exceed the previously agreed cost of $35m that the Minister of Immigration recently approved”, and that whole of life costs would “more likely be in the region of $45m”. Because that exceeded ministerial delegation, the report said, the project would now need Cabinet approval to proceed.
The version that reached Stanford a year later carried none of that. It noted the same milestone, said the mid November go live date “remains at risk” and depended on further testing, commercial negotiations and visa processing peaks, and offered a back up date in early 2024. There was no reference to the budget being breached and no reference to Cabinet.
The original only surfaced last month, when the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment sent Stanford’s office a package of documents it was preparing to release proactively. Stanford has now passed both versions to Michael Heron KC, who is leading the inquiry into Immigration New Zealand, and asked him to establish whether the information was deliberately kept from her. No findings have been made against anyone, and the inquiry has not reported.
The Biometric Capability Upgrade was a seven year attempt to replace the ageing systems used to check the identity of people crossing the New Zealand border. It began inside Immigration New Zealand in 2018, ran through repeated delays and cost increases, and was stopped in December 2025 without delivering what it promised. MBIE told ministers, the Education and Workforce Committee and the public in June that the costs to be written off were around $33 million.
That figure did not hold. In late July, Stanford’s office was checking MBIE’s answers to follow up questions from the select committee and concluded the financial information could not be correct. In a statement issued on 29 July, Stanford said the ministry’s chief executive had then identified another $6 million in associated project costs, taking the total wasted past $40 million. She said the chief executive “cannot be confident this further $6 million represents the full extent of expenditure on the BCU and he has made the decision to commission an independent financial audit”.
Stanford said in the same statement that she had referred the matter to both the Heron inquiry and Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche, because it raised “significant questions regarding MBIE’s financial controls more generally”. The Government also asked Roche to consider whether the inquiry’s terms needed widening to capture everything connected to the project. Speaking to media at the time, Stanford said, as reported by 1News, “As soon as we pull one thread, more and more unravels”, and added that “My staff and me should not be the final line of defence”.
An earlier review by consultant Greg James had already raised the question of whether MBIE used what it called creative accounting to keep the project below the $35 million whole of life threshold that would have triggered Cabinet scrutiny. That threshold is the same one the 2023 report to Little said had been breached.
Running alongside all of this is a separate parliamentary process. MBIE chief executive Nic Blakeley appeared before the Education and Workforce Committee in March and was asked about the project’s risks and milestones without telling MPs it had already been terminated. Labour’s Phil Twyford raised it as a matter of privilege, Speaker Gerry Brownlee referred it on, and Blakeley fronted the Privileges Committee on 28 July. He told MPs “we got it wrong, I accept that, and we should have said differently”, while saying he had held a genuine belief that budget and commercial sensitivities limited what he could say in public. It was that appearance, and the answers given in it, that prompted Stanford’s office to keep digging.
Stanford declined to say anything further when RNZ asked whether the two conflicting reports had further shaken her confidence in her officials and in the chief executive. The ministry also declined to comment while the inquiry is under way.
The politics of this are awkward for everyone. The project was approved and run under the previous Labour government and continued into this one, and the documents now in front of Heron suggest ministers on both sides were working from incomplete pictures. What is at stake is less about which party signed off the spending and more about whether ministers can rely on what their departments tell them, which is the question the Public Service Commissioner set the inquiry up to answer. With a general election due this year, how the public service is held to account is shaping up as one of the quieter arguments of the campaign. If you want to compare where the parties stand before you vote, our voting tool lets you do that in a few minutes.
Two things now sit outside the ministry’s hands. The independent financial audit will establish how much the failed upgrade actually cost, a number nobody has yet been able to state with confidence. The Heron inquiry will decide whether officials withheld information from ministers, and whether that was deliberate. Until both report, the total remains an estimate and the allegations remain untested.
What do you make of it? Should ministers be expected to audit the advice they are given, or is that a failure of the public service itself? Leave a comment below and tell us what you think.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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