Immigration Minister must tell full story

A decision by Immigration New Zealand to keep clients who have had personal details compromised in the dark needs explaining, Labour’s Immigration spokesperson Darien Fenton says.

Figures obtained by Labour show that of 207 people who had private information wrongly released in the last three years, just 12 had been told of the breach.

“Immigration Minister Nathan Guy needs to explain why. For all we know, it could be the tip of the iceberg.

“Immigration NZ is in the process of developing a Global management database that will be shared around the world.

At the same time staff, already under pressure with their merger into the “super ministry’, MoBIE, are also dealing with fall-out from the Student Visa scandal and questions around off-shore corruption.

“Immigration New Zealand store the personal information of hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom are now permanent residents or here on work visas. The potential for a nightmare of the scale we’ve seen at Work and Income, ACC and Inland Revenue is enormous

“I want to know that Nathan Guy is on top of this. He also needs to assure the New Zealand public he is,” says Darien Fenton.