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Annual report
Purpose: To identify and remove or update the records of people who are deceased from the Immigration New Zealand (INZ) database of overstayers and temporary permit holders.
BDM disclosure to INZ: BDM provides information from the Deaths Register covering the six months prior to the extract date. The information includes full name at birth, full name at death, gender, birth date, death date, country of birth, and number of years lived in New Zealand.
Compliance: Compliant.
Technical information
| Information matching provision | Births, Deaths, and Marriages Registration Act 2021, s.112 |
| Year authorised | 2001 |
| Year commenced | 2007 |
| Programme type | Updating data Detecting illegal behaviour |
System description
Twice a year BDM provides INZ with an encrypted CD of death records for the six months prior to the extraction date. Each record of a deceased person can include the full name at birth, full name at death, date of birth, gender, birth place, death date, and number of years lived in New Zealand.
INZ imports the death records into a temporary file held within their internal network. The death records are then processed through a series of matching cycles where the matching criteria is progressively widened to allow for less exact matches to be considered. Potential matches are written to a match report where they are manually checked before being accepted or rejected.
Where an individual on a temporary visa appears to have died, INZ marks the record as ‘deceased’ and includes an alert stating that the death information is unverified and no action should be taken regarding the person unless independent proof of the death (or to the contrary) is received. Marking the record as ‘deceased’ also prevents the record from passing from the temporary visa list onto the overstayer list once the temporary visa expires. Where a match identifies a deceased individual already on the overstayer list, the record is updated to ‘deceased’ so that no further enforcement effort is made to locate that person.
No notices of adverse action are sent for this programme. INZ believes that adding the annotation and alert on matched records does not constitute an adverse action.
| Death records for the period | 2015/16 | 2016/17 | 2017/18 | 2019/20 | 2020/21 | 2021/22 | 2022/23 |
| Records received for matching | 31,675 | 31,444 | 33,852 | 34,372 | 32,826 | 17,786 | 38,186 |
| Number of possible matches identified |
1,109 | 1,288 | 1,508 | 2,051 | 289 | 595 | 1,456 |
| Number of records marked as deceased on the overstayer list |
118 | 125 | 91 | 89 | 24 | 82 | 100 |
| Number of records marked as deceased on the temporary visa holders list |
69 | 78 | 85 | 89 | 56 | 84 | 71 |
| Total number of records updated as deceased |
187 | 203 | 176 | 178 | 80 | 166 | 171 |
Not operated in 2018/19.
The utility of this provision was assessed in a report Review of statutory authorities for information matching (Sept 2017).
