Partner visa cancellations and refusals set to rise under the new data-matching investigations
In the last three years some 750 partner visas were cancelled. This number is set to rise with the launch of data-matching program by the departments of immigration and human services. Immigration and Human Services combined their respective customer databases to help uncover various types of fraud including those by couples who have lodged or been granted partner visas.
The system aims at identifying those taking welfare payments as singles, despite sponsoring overseas partners and will be looking at grants and applications from the years starting from 2012. DIBP granted 47,752 partner visas in the program year ending 2014.The biggest source nations were China, India, Britain, the Philippines, and Vietnam. These grants and other applications are now being checked against roughly seven million unique records in the Centrelink database. According to figures reported in the Herald Sun, in the last three years about 750 such visas have been cancelled for breaches of conditions, such as making bogus claims, providing incorrect information, and being of bad character.
Immigration and Border Protection Minister Peter Dutton said that the joint data-matching operation would detect partner visa frauds.
“Last year, my department identified an increase in the number of allegations relating to the facilitating of contrived marriages,” he said adding, “This data-matching program is part of a whole-of-government approach to fraud detection and prevention…“People who deliberately take advantage of Australia’s welfare and migration system will be caught.”
A report in itnews.com.au notes that under the Privacy Commissioner’s data matching rules, Immigration and DHS have to make the specifics of their data matching program public before it kicks off. The dataset will include all applicants for partner visas and their sponsors across the years 2012-13 to 2013-14.
Source: Migration Alliance
