September 20th, 2024 at 07:55 am

Shocking IRCC Assigned immigration Application to Inactive Officers | Canada Immigration

Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) discontinued assigning immigration applications to active officer IDs in favor of a substantial change known as MED, which was implemented to streamline immigration processing. This action ensures that applications are processed by active officers in real time and is part of a larger initiative to improve the effectiveness and transparency of the immigration system.

This policy move intends to improve processing times and decrease backlogs in Canada’s immigration system, which is constantly evolving. This will create a more responsive and accountable framework for applicants looking to join the nation.

Introduction

The department first denied the report’s veracity, but emails show that staff members later reallocated certain applications. To prevent files from slipping through the cracks, Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada terminated the long-standing practice of using inactive officer IDs as virtual holding bents for applications.

Following a CBC investigation that showed thousands of immigration applications were linked to the IDs and placeholder codes of hundreds of ex-employees, the federal government tidied up its global application system to make sure none had been “forgotten,” CBC News has learned.

Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has now informed CBC News that it has discontinued the long-standing procedure of utilizing the IDs of retired officers as electronic storage containers for applications to guarantee that “files do not fall through the cracks.”

Thousands of applications were being assigned to “inactive users” in the IRCC’s Global Case Management System (GCMS), which is used to handle immigration and citizenship applications, according to a story published by CBC on December 12, 2022.

According to data, in February of that year, 779 codes, which included placeholders and past employees who had logged in and processed files more than ten years ago, had been given to 59,456 “open, pending, or reopened” applications.

The IRCC said after the report ran that it had reused codes belonging to inactive users as a way of sorting and keeping applications for the next step of processing, after first failing to respond to CBC by the deadline. The IRCC added that the information CBC received only offered a fleeting glimpse into a complicated system.

Fresh Information is Revealed

A year and a half after CBC sought papers and nearly two years after that report was broadcast, the IRCC eventually released an access to information request with further details. Officials denied that the applications were ever in “limbo,” but emails that CBC was able to collect reveal that in the weeks that followed CBC’s article, several applications associated with departing staff were reallocated to current employees.

It also seems that employees had doubts about the effectiveness of their file management system. One IRCC email said, “It[‘s] fine internally, but we want to avoid… additional eyes on this,” referring to a team’s concern about the use of certain codes. Following the story’s publication by CBC, then-immigration minister Sean Fraser faced pressure in Parliament and declared that “allegations that file resting with officers who do not exist are unequivocally false.”

A few days later, an IRCC official told CBC in a technical briefing that the initial story’s premise was “inherently false,” and that none of the applications had been forgotten. On December 15, 2022, the official stated over the phone, “No files are left unattended at any point in the process.”

However, emails show that on the same day, the processing offices of the IRCC were given a network-wide assignment by the assistant deputy minister’s office to examine the list that the CBC had released. To ensure that all files allocated to inactive users were truly being processed, a senior adviser asked teams to verify that maintaining those files assigned to their IDs “still makes sense.”

The adviser later clarified in another email, “The goal was to make sure that all files are on track and moving along (and not forgotten because they were sitting assigned to a User ID no one was watching).” “It’s about files that might have been lost and inactive users,” another official told her group.

Files Reassigned, IDs ‘Deactivated’

In the days that followed the CBC investigation, several teams reported back that they had “deactivated” certain dormant user IDs and reallocated some apps. At the beginning of 2022, for instance, the Windsor, Ontario, office of the IRCC discovered one open citizenship application that was “assigned to an employee that left. “This application has been reassigned to the current level 2 decision maker,” the message states.

One open case, according to the Hamilton and Niagara team, “is now assigned to an active user.”

According to the Ottawa office, it will “update the list to remove any employees who are no longer working” and “will proactively action other departures in 2022, but will focus on the 5 persons identified in the report.”

Workers “reviewed and corrected” files at another office.

“All… assigned to an inactive user ID have been reviewed and re-assigned,” they stated. “We will process and correct over the next few weeks.” Additionally, employees noticed discrepancies and reported certain applications that seemed to have been rejected, “not closed off properly,” or incorrectly assigned.

One senior adviser commented, “To me, that doesn’t make sense,” questioning why files were assigned to employees of a different team but were “still sitting” in an office in Sydney, Nova Scotia.

Another employee said, “What should we do about these user IDs?”

• Additionally, they discovered many “ghost” programs.
• “Based on a quick sampling, I think that many of these are just ghost apps stranded for various reasons, but I would like to see if we can review these apps to make sure that none of them have been lost for any reason,” a message reads.

Staff Question System

Some officials and even IRCC employees questioned the rationale of the file management system, with one even posing the question, “Why are we using old employee code?”

In response, the director general of IT operations for the IRCC said, “I can’t comment on why we are using old employee code but trust that the information received is accurate.” However, as early as October 2022, a few teams had already reported this problem and requested that the GCMS team establish generic bins rather than use “personal codes” as stand-ins.

A portion of a deleted email from November states, “We need to put pressure on GCMS to have these codes created and activated for use.” That employee went so far as to offer their user ID as a workaround to ensure that codes used as placeholder buckets came from “current” employees.

An assistant director noted the previous email chain following the publication of CBC’s original article, recommending a “deeper dive into workload management.” Subsequently, a senior adviser proposed that the IRCC launch a “project” in 2023 “to try and get everyone off of inactive user IDs and switch to generic bins to prevent such questions and confusion from appearing again.”

Questioning also centered on whether IT personnel “cleaned” the system “regularly.” At first, not even the director general of information technology operations knew the answers to those queries.

The IT representative stated in an email on December 12, 2022, “We do have a process in place initiated by [the operations team] (if I remember correctly).” “I recall that we conducted an audit that included this procedure a few years ago. I’m looking through my email. IT “seems to be indicating that there is a process in place… but cannot say with certainty if it has been followed,” an operations officer subsequently restated.

IRCC No Longer Using Inactive IDs

The IRCC turned down CBC’s request for an interview to talk about this new information. In an email, it was disclosed that the department switched to employing “generic IDs” to classify applications as they went through its processing system between April and May 2023, four months after the CBC story.

According to IRCC, it has produced 125 new generic IDs and will add more as needed. “All potentially inactive user IDs were systematically reassigned to the newly established generic Responsibility Center (RC) IDs,” the IRCC stated on Friday. “This ensures that files do not fall through the cracks when officers are unexpectedly away, retire, etc.”

A permanent residence (PR) applicant who was interviewed by CBC for the original report, however, stated that they were granted PR four months after the story was published. “[It’s] a little bit disappointing,” stated Andrea Bote, whose case at the time had the code RA9519.

Emails revealed that RA9519 was one of seven IDs that had files mistakenly identified as coming from the Sydney, New South Wales, office. Afterward, during the review, they were moved to the appropriate team. “I hope this kind of leads to an even better overhaul … being more proactive in solving these issues rather than being reactive,” Bote said on Thursday.

Even though the department was responding to media attention, immigration attorney Jamie Liew, who has voiced concerns about the secrecy of the IRCC’s system, said it’s positive that the files were reviewed. “Having said that, it would be great for the government to be more transparent about what it’s doing now … instead of having this [latest] information come to light through an [access to information] request,” Liew stated.

Bureaucrats were reminded by Liew that “real people are behind these files.” “People’s lives are at stake, and [their] future and their plans.”