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Annual Report
Purpose: To remove from the Immigration New Zealand (INZ) overstayer records the names of people who have been granted New Zealand citizenship.
Citizenship disclosure to INZ: Citizenship provides information from the Citizenship Register about people who have been granted citizenship. Each record includes full name, gender, date of birth, country of birth and citizenship person number.
Compliance: Not operated 2018/19.
Technical information
| Information matching provision | Citizenship Act 1977, s.26A |
| Year authorised | 2001 |
| Year commenced | 2004 |
| Programme type | Updating data |
| Unique identifiers | DIA's Citizenship number |
Twice a year, the NZ citizenship office provides INZ with an encrypted CD of citizenship records for individuals who have been granted New Zealand citizenship during the six months prior to the extraction date. Each citizenship record includes the full name, gender, date of birth, country of birth, and citizenship person number. INZ compares the citizenship information with information it holds about overstayers.
The matching process uses up to seven matching cycles in which the matching criteria are gradually widened to allow for less exact match results to be considered. The match results are written to a match extract report which INZ staff review before accepting or rejecting each match result. No notices of adverse action (s.103) are sent out because individuals matched successfully benefit from being removed from the overstayers’ register and unsuccessful matches do not give rise to any adverse action.
In addition to matching records for the current period, INZ complete one match each year against historical citizenship records previously received. Historical records are used to identify individuals who have been re-added to INZ’s temporary visa-holder records because they have returned to New Zealand using their non-New Zealand passport.
| 2013/14 | 2014/15 | 2015/16 | 2016/17 | 2017/18 | 2019/20 | 2020/21 | |
| Match runs | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Records compared | 1,364,259 | 1,447,113 | 1,542,223 | 1,637,872 | 1,740,282 | 81,825 | 55,618 |
| Useable matches | 6,969 | 7,231 | 7,770 | 7,926 | 8,866 | 579 | 337 |
| NZ citizen records removed from the overstayers list |
372 | 402 | 430 | 402 | 358 | 280 | 101 |
Not operated in 2018/19
The utility of this provision was assessed in the report Review of statutory authorities for information matching (September 2017).
