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Annual Report
Purpose: To identify prisoners who fall within the deportation provisions of the Immigration Act 2009 as a result of their criminal convictions, or are subject to deportation from the country because their visa to be in New Zealand has expired.
Corrections disclosure to INZ: Corrections discloses information about all newly admitted prisoners. Each prisoner record includes full name (and known aliases), date and place of birth, gender, prisoner unique identifier, and name of the prison facility. Each prisoner's offence and sentence information is also included.
INZ disclosure to Corrections: For prisoners who are subject to removal or deportation orders, and who have no further means of challenging those orders, INZ discloses the full name, date and place of birth, gender, citizenship, prisoner unique identifier, immigration status and details of removal action that INZ intends to take.
Compliance: Compliant.
Technical information
| Information matching provisions | Corrections Act 2004, s.181; Immigration Act 2009, s.294 |
| Year authorised | 2004 |
| Year commenced | 2005 |
| Programme type | Confirming eligibility Updating data |
| Unique identifiers | Corrections Entity Identification Number |
| On-Line transfers | Yes |
System description
Each week, Corrections uses an encrypted connection to transfer a file containing details of all newly admitted prisoners to a third party service provider. Immigration New Zealand (INZ) uses a secure connection to access and retrieve the file held by the service provider. The service provider cannot trigger uploads or downloads, and has no access to the contents of any file.
Each prisoner record (including individuals sentenced to home detention includes identifying infomration such as full name (including aliases), date of birth, gender, and citizenship. Also included are details of the prisoner’s offence, home detention details (if applicable), length of sentence, and dates of sentence commencement, parole eligibility and statutory release.
INZ matches the prisoner information with information relating to persons who are in New Zealand unlawfully or on temporary visas. The matching process uses different combinations of information to identify possible matches. The match results are manually checked before a letter (s.181 notice of adverse action) is sent to the individual at the prison. To make absolutely sure that the correct person has been identified, INZ Compliance Operations staff interview the prisoner.
Where a prisoner is subject to deportation or removal orders and has no further rights of appeal, INZ supplies Corrections with the prisoner’s immigration status, including the date of any proposed removal action. This helps Corrections to make appropriate decisions about the prisoner’s management. For example, a prisoner might not be considered for re-integration assistance or temporary release.
| 2018/19 | 2019/20 | 2020/21 | 2021/22 | 2022/23 | |
| Match runs | 52 | 52 | 51 | 52 | 53 |
| Number of client cases revealed by matching |
571 | 535 | 498 | 368 | 438 |
| Cases excluded as not being eligible for removal or deportation |
543 | 508 | 474 | 357 | 411 |
| Notices of adverse action | 28 | 27 | 24 | 11 | 27 |
| Successful challenges | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 4 |
| Cases considered for removal or deportation |
26 | 26 | 22 | 9 | 24 |
| Number of removals and deportations from NZ at year's end |
23 | 18 | 2 | 4 | 5 |
As removals and deportations can take many years to complete and because of the manual nature of the processes associated with this match, INZ advises that it is not realistic for them to update the figures for previous fiscal years. Instead, the removal and deportations recorded as at each year end includes cases initiated in previous years but completed in the current fiscal year. In effect, we provide a rolling result of case outcomes from the commencement of the programme.
The utility of this provision was assessed in a report Review of statutory authorities for information matching (Sept 2017)
