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Annual Report
The Ministry of Justice ceased (in September 2016) to operate their programme with Immigration NZ for arrival and departure information to help locate people who owe fines. This is because of the significant manual effort involved and the comparatively low benefits from the programme. MoJ is considering alternative approaches to receiving the information.
| Information matching provision | Immigration Act 2009, s.295 |
| Year authorised | 2006 |
| Year commenced | 2006 |
| Programme type | Locating people |
| Unique Identifiers | Passport number Personal profile number |
| On-line transfers | Yes |
Purpose: To enable the Ministry of Justice to locate people who have outstanding fines in order to enforce payment.
Justice disclosure to INZ: Justices sends INZ details of serious fine defaulters who have triggered a 'silent' alert as part of the linked Customs/Justice Fines Defaulters Alerts Programme. Each record includes the full name, date of birth, gender, passport number, Justice unique identifier number and flight information of the fines defaulter.
INZ disclosure to Justice: INZ supplies information contained on the arrival and departure card, which includes full name, date of birth, gender, passport number, nationality, occupation, New Zealand address and date of expected return to New Zealand (in the case of a departing traveller).
System description
This programme is linked to the Customs/Justice Fines Defaulters Alerts Programme as silent alert information provided from the Customs/Justice programme is subsequently used by Justice to match with arrival and departure information held by Immigration New Zealand (INZ)[1].
Each day, Customs sends Justice, by encrypted online transfer, silent alert notifications for fines defaulters who have left from or returned to New Zealand. Justice extracts from these notifications the following information about fines defaulters and sends INZ a weekly transfer using an encrypted communication channel:
| Family/Given names | Date of birth | Gender |
| Passport number | Date and time of travel | Flight/vessel number |
| Personal profile number | Direction of travel |
INZ manually extracts the relevant arrival or departure card for each matched individual. Obtaining these details enables Justice to avoid expending resources unnecessarily chasing defaulters who are out of the country, and to be ready to recommence enforcement action promptly on a traveller's return and trace them to their declared address. INZ provides Justice with the following information:
| Family/Given names | Date of birth | Gender |
| Passport number | Nationality | Expiry date of any permit |
| NZ residential address | Expected return date (for departing travellers) |
Occupation |
If the address received from INZ is new, and no action has occurred on the individual's profile since the silent alert was activated, Justice sends out a notice of adverse action (s.181 notice) to the New Zealand address supplied. If no challenge is received in response to the notice, the individual's profile becomes available for action at the Collections Unit nearest to the recently supplied address.
Recent activity
| 2012/13 | 2013/14 | 2014/15 | 2015/16 | 2016/17 | |
| Requests sent to INZ | 5,285 | 5,367 | 6,901 | 6,796 | 0 |
| Notices of adverse action | 356 | 45 | 174 | 49 | 0 |
| Successful challenges | 0 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 0 |
| Payment received for fines | $70,759 | $3,060 | $12,239 | $4,462 | 0 |
| Amounts under a current time-to-pay arrangement | $16,324 | $16,801 | $18,645 | $24,489 | 0 |
| Remittals/Alternative sentence imposed | $106,648 | $1,924 | $1,420 | $5,398 | 0 |
Figures as at 30 June
Results for 2013/14 are overall significantly lower than in previous years. Justice requests for information for the period January 2014 to June 2014 were not processed by INZ due to staff shortages and a move to new premises.
Processing was suspended from September 2014 to December 2014 while Justice implemented safeguards to meet the online transfer approval conditions.
From January to June 2016, Justice has not processed any information due to delays in receiving information from INZ. Justice considered that the age of the information meant it was unusable for the collection and enforcement of fines.
Justice stopped operating this programme on 28 September 2016 because of the significant level of manual work involved and the relatively low return.
The utility of this provision was assessed in the report Review of statutory authorities for information matching (September 2017).
[1] For an explanation of how silent alert information is generated, see the system description for the Customs/Justice Fines Defaulters Programme.
