Software faults in Immigration New Zealand’s online visa system let 32 visitor visas and 23 Job Check applications be approved without an immigration officer ever assessing them, according to official briefings to Immigration Minister Erica Stanford reported by RNZ on Wednesday 30 September.
The approvals were made by ADEPT, the online visa processing platform Immigration New Zealand launched in 2022. It is the backbone of Our Future Services, the $336 million technology programme that Cabinet sent back for a new business case this month after its promised savings were found to be overstated by $134 million.
The auto-approvals matter because of what the Government said the system would and would not do. When Cabinet approved the $336 million project, RNZ reported that decisions to approve visas would be automated while decisions to reject applications would stay with staff. Automated decision-making is already allowed under immigration law, but according to RNZ the agency had not yet used that power. In 2025 it said the systems were about two years away from the data, testing and quality assurance needed for good automated decisions. Yet months later staff found a visitor visa that had been approved with no manual assessment at all.
A sweep then turned up 32 visitor visa applications approved the same way over the previous three years, and 23 Job Check applications approved without manual assessment between February and November 2022. A Job Check is the step where an accredited employer shows Immigration New Zealand that it has tried to find a New Zealander for a role before hiring a migrant.
“Technical Advisors have reviewed all 32 auto-approved Visitor Visa applications. Twenty of those visas have been used for travel to New Zealand with no adverse outcome noted,” officials told the minister. Six of the applications were reopened for full assessment because of high risk factors, and one of those was recommended for decline.
Immigration New Zealand’s online services director, Katy MacLeod, said the fault let applications skip a step that should have stopped them. “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,” she said in a statement to RNZ.
The fix took two months to deploy. The briefing said earlier attempts in October had been complicated by wider Microsoft issues, and the system has since been monitored to make sure the automatic approvals do not happen again.
It was not the only fault. RNZ reported that in 2025 staff found 364 applicants for multiple entry visitor visas for parents and grandparents had not been asked whether they had lived in a country with a high rate of tuberculosis since their last clear chest x-ray. Of those, 295 were granted visas. Another 21 applicants were not asked for an x-ray even though they had declared spending more than six months in a high tuberculosis country.
“Their individual risk of currently having TB is still relatively low,” Stanford was told. Immigration New Zealand said it would contact the applicants and ask them to seek medical advice if they have or develop symptoms of the disease.
Employers were caught up too. A glitch in 2025 affected around 2300 businesses whose accreditation had lapsed and then been renewed. Their migrant workers dropped off the employers’ ADEPT dashboards, so they could not resend the job tokens migrants need for an accredited employer work visa, or tell Immigration New Zealand that a worker had left. It was fixed in March 2025, but officials said a data clean-up was also needed and the exact number of employers affected was hard to pin down.
The most recent problem came in August 2026. After a system update on 23 August, some tourists applying for visitor visas could not submit draft applications if they had already added a second person to them. MacLeod said a permanent fix was applied on 26 August and testing confirmed it was working. RNZ reported that the number of travellers affected is not known.
The timing is awkward for the agency. Ministers have asked the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, which runs Immigration New Zealand, to report back before April 2027 on the programme’s strategic case for change, its finances and how it will be delivered. According to RNZ, Our Future Services was sold on $453 million of savings but on current estimates would now cost money if it goes ahead, and about $25 million was spent in its first year.
When the savings error came to light earlier this month, Stanford said she and other ministers had been kept in the dark about the programme’s progress, though she did not believe the benefits had been deliberately inflated.
For most visitors the practical risk appears small. Twenty of the auto-approved visitors travelled here without incident and only one application was ultimately recommended for decline. The bigger question is one of trust. The Government promised that a person, not a machine, would stand behind decisions on who gets into the country, and between 2022 and 2025 the software sometimes went further than that on its own.
Border settings, migration numbers and how well government agencies manage large IT projects are all live issues heading into the election. If you are still weighing up where the parties stand, you can find out which party best matches your views with our voting tool.
Should Immigration New Zealand be allowed to approve visas automatically at all, or should every decision go past a human? Tell us what you think 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 🙂
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