Jill Bonnet

The report writer suggests that

Elsewhere, it was $40 million.

And then the other part of the project was itself another $8 million.

So I think there's like a $5 million discrepancy maybe.

Well.

I can only go on what they said the importance of the system was.

It was meant to be an important part of the identity management and therefore the anti-fraud kind of systems that immigration relies on.

Um, it's meant to be the authoritative source of identities for non New Zealanders, not only for immigration, New Zealand themselves, but for across government.

So it was due to be like a very much more efficient system.

The higher levels of automation meant that they weren't having to manually match photographs anymore.

So you can imagine how long that would take and the impact on processing times and therefore costs.

And so, yeah, I mean, it's an incredibly big deal, both that it's gone so badly wrong, but also that we now don't have a system that we presumably really need.

Are officials facing the SEC over this?

I think that they've been talking about the fact that heads might roll, but some of those heads may have already left.

Obviously, it was a six, seven year project.

And the question of who that would be anyway, it's a little bit murky because so many people have, you know, touched it over the years.

Immigration New Zealand itself has been carrying the can for this but in fact it wasn't an INZ project from 2022 onwards it was a wider MBE

They had a restructure and the ECU went into the Digital Data and Insights Division.

So the head of that, I don't think he's any longer there.

The head of Immigration New Zealand and the head of MBIE have both recently retired, resigned.