Photo: RNZ
Machines will take over more jobs at Immigration New Zealand under a multi-million dollar upgrade.
Decisions to approve visas will be automated under the government's plan to modernise online systems and do away with paper forms. Decisions to reject applications will continue to be taken by staff.
It would for the first time allow the platform that analyses risk trends to be connected to the visa processing system, Adept.
Cabinet last week gave the green light to a $336 million project to overhaul the immigration system, also leaving open the door to adding a digital ID credential for migrants to its plans.
The seven-year Our Future Services project would include an e-chip passport reader and real-time identity liveness checks.
The Cabinet paper warned the immigration system lacked the tools and capabilities to predict and respond to risk, affecting its response to migrant exploitation and national security risks.
It predicts savings through a reduction in staff - though the number of job losses is not shown - with estimated cuts of $344m over several years.
It forecasts fewer people will need phone support, saving $19m, and a further $3m cuts in postage and storage costs.
Around 160,000 paper applications are received each year, which makes up about 15 percent of INZ's visa workload but 42 percent of its 217 visa types.
Photo: RNZ
Its general manager of service design and implementation Karen Bishop said the programme had a number of objectives. "One is efficiency, one is improved identification and management of risk. One is being a bit more agile in terms of how long it takes us to change things and the last one is improving our customer experience."
Its Microsoft-built Adept system currently only manages accredited work visas, permanent residence and transit visas. It automates individual checks, but does not make decisions on whether someone's visa is approved.
"We don't have any end-to-end automated decision-making as yet," she said.
"There's quite a lot of prep work that has to be done before we go to automation around developing an automated decision making standard and actually making sure that we've got quality assurance processes in place, testing any automated decision-making against human decision-making for a period of time so that we actually can look at consistency of decisions.
"I think it's around 2027 by the time we get to that point. There's quite a lot of of work to be done to just get the standard in place to ensure that all our data is in a good shape, to get enough data actually into our Adept system, to give us enough for good decision making. There's quite a lot that really has to happen in that space first."
Ethical issues
Until now, software which can help process visa applications stopped short of making decisions about which migrants are allowed into the country, with INZ saying as recently as 2022 that Adept was designed only to automate specific checks.
Automation has been a contentious subject for INZ, with officials suggesting it was a sensitive subject and academics concerned it could either bake human bias into decisions, or affect staff decisions through profiling.
A 2018 government report which followed fears of predictive risk-profiling showed INZ uses operational algorithms to manage risk and speed up decisions, including biometric and biographic matching, screening and case prioritising.
Academics said caution was needed on basing decisions on risk profiles as humans often deferred to a computer's judgment.
The Ministry of Social Development has developed guidelines for business rules, data-based algorithms and statistically or analytically derived patterns in machine learning or artificial intelligence, and spells out checks that are needed for transparency, oversight and to overcome bias. Bishop said similar safeguards would be in place for INZ's automated decisions, which were already enabled through legislation.
"In the requirements are things like ensuring that decisions are lawful and align with policy intent, that we are really clear that we manage any bias carefully, all those sorts of things just to really put safeguards in place. And that it's really transparent for people so that they understand where they might have been subject to an automated decision.
"We don't envisage ever declining applications through automated decision making because largely the automated decision making checks to ensure that all the criteria have been met. So where a criteria hasn't been met that might result in a decline, we would expect that to be put out to a person so that they could actually check whether that criteria had been met or whether we have to go back to the applicant and ask them for some more information."
The Treasury Investment Panel has assessed the project's own risk profile as 'high', based on its complexity, the need to migrate multiple products onto one platform and decommissioning old systems.
Risks outlined in the Cabinet paper include staff reaction to the changes, the forecast benefits not occurring and any delays caused by outside vendors. The option Cabinet chose, although the most expensive out of four presented, was assessed as offering the most value for money, and would be delivered in three phases over seven years.
As it progressed, it would be paid for by application fees and from the savings it would create. Once complete, it would deliver ongoing annual net savings of at least $80 million.
The reforms would do away with piecemeal changes which have dogged INZ systems for two decades, with criticism levelled at previous high-profile projects such as Vision 15, large restructure programmes and the start of the Adept project in 2021.
"I think we've tried it piecemeal before and I think that's been the problem," said Bishop. "By year four, the monetary benefits of the programme will actually outweigh its costs. We are focused on really delivering benefits with this programme and it's up to us. It's really within our control because we're funding the programme through fees and levies, but also through realising efficiencies and benefits. And so we need to do that in actual in order to be able to continue to fund the programme so there's an incentive to focus on it."
Its existing visa platform AMS would remain as a system of record, holding data on products people have applied for, been granted and how long they have stayed.
She said while much of the work will be finished sooner, the last paper applications are expected to be phased out in 2031.
