Dear Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment,

I have following questions for you and need this information:
1 - how many paper based SMC applications are still in process who have applied from Dec 2019 till Mar 2020. Please divide them into onshore and offshore and month-wise.
2- Some of these applicants were not eligible for RV21 and/or haven’t applied for RV21, please indicate those separately.
3- Why all the onshore SMC applicants were not eligible for RV21? And who is responsible for pushing them behind the queue?
4- Now, while these people are suffering from drastic changes in immigration policies and settings, Will minister or immigration New Zealand formally apologise to these applicants? Because they are suffering from immigration policies which were not even available at the time of their applications. Some of them are waiting from 3 years since they submitted the application.
5- What’s the time frame to process all these existing paper based SMC applications or these applicants will be in limbo and wait for another 2-3 years?
6- Please provide the information how many immigration officers are working on these old SMC applications.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Yours faithfully,

Muhammad

Dear INZ OIAs,

Thank you for your response. I really appreciate it. You mentioned in your response that “ People who had submitted applications or expressions of interest for SMC were not excluded from applying – those with applications lodged were actually able to apply earlier (from 1 December 2021) than all other potential applicants (from 1 March 2022). There are other options for residence available to those who were not eligible for the 2021 Resident Visa, the Government was conscious that nobody should end up worse off, and many people have much more favourable outcomes than they may have otherwise expected”.

This above argument is not true at all. All the applicants who have submitted SMC or EOI were not eligible for RV21. Some applicants were onshore with submitted SMC applications or EOIs, however they were excluded from RV21 because they were not holding the eligible visa on 29-September-2021. Indeed, those onshore applicants are worsen off in several ways and it is solely due to Government and INZ policy changes.
1- These onshore applicants are still waiting for an outcome for their SMC applications because INZ moved the immigration officers to RV21 and only a handful of team were working on paper based SMC applications.
2- They paid extra money for SMC while RV21 had lower application fee and shorter processing time.
3- They are suffering from anxiety and stress due to overnight policy and priority changes by INZ and/or Government.

I believe that these facts need to be corrected and remedial actions need to be taken by INZ and/or Government to compensate these applicants who suffered from these policy changes. I am seeking your explanation in this regard.

Yours sincerely,

Muhammad