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Annual Report
Purpose: To enable the Registrar-General to determine the citizenship-by-birth status of a person born in New Zealand on or after 1 January 2006, for the purpose of recording the person's citizenship status on his or her birth registration entry.
BDM disclosure to Citizenship: For birth registration applications, when no parental birth record can be found, a request is transferred electronically to the Citizenship unit to be manually checked against the relevant citizenship records. The information supplied includes the child's date of birth, parent's full names and birth details.
Citizenship disclosure to BDM: Citizenship responds to these requests by stating either the type of qualifying record found or that qualifying records were not found.
Compliance: Compliant.
| Information matching provision | Citizenship Act 1977, s.26A |
| Year authorised | 2005 |
| Year commenced | 2006 |
| Programme type | Confirming eligibility |
| Unique identifiers | Lifedata number NZ citizenship certificate number |
| Online transfers | Yes |
System description
Birth registration application forms are scanned and loaded for overnight batch processing by DIA's Lifedata birth registration system. All potential matches identified by the system are displayed for an operator to review and select the correct match. Applications for which no parental match can be found on the Births Register are sent as an electronic file to the NZ Citizenship Office to confirm the citizenship status of a person's parent/s at the time of the person's birth.
Citizenship staff members check the relevant citizenship register or immigration records. Passport records are checked where a parent has indicated that he or she is a citizen or permanent resident of Tokelau, Niue or the Cook Islands. The record is updated with the results of the search and released back to BDM, normally on the same day it is received.
Where BDM cannot confirm that at least one of the parents is a citizen or permanent resident of New Zealand, Australia, Cook Islands, Niue or Tokelau, BDM send a notice of adverse action (s.181 letter) to the applicant. If no response to the letter is received by DIA within five working days of deemed delivery, the child's birth is registered but the register entry will record that the child is not a New Zealand citizen by birth.
Recent activity
| 2018/19 | 2019/20 | 2020/21 | 2021/22 | 2022/23 | |
| Births registered | 59,781 | 59,679 | 58,905 | 61,130 | 59,039 |
| Notices of adverse action | 2,362 | 2,806 | 2,937 | 2,493 | 1,203 |
| Challenges received | 36 | 67 | 111 | 22 | 11 |
| Successful challenges | 23 | 24 | 87 | 14 | 9 |
| Citizenship by birth declined | 2,339 | 2,857 | 2,857 | 2,810 | 1,444 |
The utility of this provision was assessed in a report “Passports and Citizenship” (July 2014) and again in “Accident Compensation Corporation, Department of Internal Affairs, and Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (Motor Vehicle Traders Register) information matching” (February 2020).
