Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What were the main issues with Immigration New Zealand's tech upgrade?
Immigration Minister Erica Stanford today launched a scathing takedown of her ministry off the back of a report detailing a litany of expensive mistakes in the biometric project. The upgrade was to the system that collects information central to border control like fingerprints and facial recognition. It started in 2019 and dragged on for about seven years, morphing along the way.
A report into the failed project has found the true state of it was at times misrepresented. Assessments were overly optimistic. More than 170 project changes should probably have signalled problems. But despite multiple red flags and opportunities to stop, they did not.
Firstly, ministers were misled. Secondly, people were moved from the project when they raised concerns. And thirdly, and this is quite serious, creative accounting practices had been undertaken to keep costs of the project below Cabinet's mandated limit.
Hi, I'm Alexia Russell, and today on The Detail, I'm speaking to the RNZ journalist whose reporting on Immigration New Zealand's failed technology project sparked shock and anger from the department's minister. Tight-lipped words that Erica Stanford aimed at her public servants.
That is very concerning. When you have people who are trying to do the right thing and raise concerns about the viability of a project who are then moved on from that project. I've certainly been misled and I worked that out pretty quickly. What I was told was pure fiction.
Boy, this was strong language from the Minister yesterday. Is she right?
She is. I mean, her feelings are very strong.
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Chapter 2: What were the major red flags during the project?
I think they represent the feelings of the previous Ministers as well. So we've got quite a task ahead of us. to rebuild the confidence and trust that we legitimately need to do our jobs.
This technology project not only wasted more than $31 million, public servants used creative accounting to keep decisions away from Cabinet oversight, gave misleading information to ministers, and persisted, despite multiple red flags, over a seven-year period.
I mean that is literally the trifecta of terrible things that you would expect from the public service and that has to be cleaned up so that we can have confidence moving forward.
Even the Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche didn't mince words with John Campbell on Morning Report yesterday.
And those are completely unacceptable behaviours. The complete lack of integrity is an affront to the people who work every day on behalf of New Zealand. They haven't let the public servants down. Of course, I don't know that I've heard public service commissioners speak that strongly very often.
So, let's unravel it. Jill Bonnet is RNZ's immigration reporter. Can you tell me what actually is this project all about? What was it supposed to do?
Yeah. So it aimed to upgrade Immigration New Zealand's identity management system, which was outdated and, you know, had algorithms that dated back to 2012. And it was just an upgrade at that point, hence the name.
it was I think a couple of years later that it morphed into something that was bigger and that's when it didn't go through its due diligence and the case that would have had to have been made for for this bigger project anyway yes in terms of what it actually wanted to do it was like identity fraud uh making sure that you know they could match the biometric and biographic details um like photographs and fingerprints and um so it was a very complex project and uh
I'm not sure how much of it has actually, you know, will still be able to be used from what the minister says it's been wasted.
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Chapter 3: How did creative accounting affect the project's budget?
Right, before the rag was pulled kind of thing.
Yeah, and that was last year. I think that the finances are really interesting actually because if you dig into it a little bit deeper, it's clear that the 35 million that they've insisted was the amount spent on that. 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.
Has this affected the service at Immigration New Zealand?
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.
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Chapter 4: What was the intended purpose of the biometric project?
How many senior people who worked on this project are still in your ministry?
I don't want to get into all the employment.
No, but there'll be hundreds of people working in your ministry, Nick. I'm not asking you for names and positions. Just how many of the senior staff who worked on this project are still employed by your ministry?
senior staff could be a handful but after the Public Service Commission's investigation into the integrity I will then undertake a further review of employment from an employment perspective if that's appropriate given what the Public Service Commission finds.
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.
And so who's left to carry the can? I can't say that it will be very clear when the Public Service Commission looks at this.
Who blew the whistle on this or how did it all explode like this?
It's not clear in the report and I'm interested also to know that. I think that the minister started asking questions and I don't know whether she was prompted by something that she'd seen before
whether they came asking for a little bit more money and then she started looking into it more deeply because there was certainly 2024 was after the change of government and Erica Stanford would have seen these documents. This is the time when she thinks she's been misled by her ministry and whether at that point it's gone...
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Chapter 5: How did the project's timeline impact its success?
But yeah, so I think that the minister, clearly the public service commissioner is also very angry about what's happened. And I should imagine that MB as a whole is because obviously it casts aspersions on staff who are going about their business and perfectly truthfully and accurately and getting their jobs done efficiently.
So, yeah, there's a lot of people that have got some interest in knowing really what happened here.
So how long have you been following this for the whole entire duration of the failed project?
It started in 2019. It wasn't actually one of those things that got announced. I think maybe it was one of those things that I said before went under the radar. And it was only when it turned up in, started to turn up in briefings, then I put in NOIA and found some more information out and started to get those weekly briefings that the minister gets and seeing the problems that were recurring.
So, yes. So, was there one red flag for you? How can I put this? Immigration has lots of problems with finances. Like in 2020, it was $135 million in the red. And so, it's not unusual to have Things going wrong there in terms of project overruns, cost overruns. I think with this one, it was a doubling of the capital expenditure.
So what they thought was going to be 19 million in 2019, three or four years later, it already doubled to that $35 million amount that it got to. And so I think that was the part where it wasn't clear what was going wrong. And then there was discussion about the fallings out with the lead vendor, like the supplier. And so.
Yeah, I think that's the thing that was kind of interesting and how it all came to command.
And Jill, this isn't your first really great story about what's going on at Immigration New Zealand. And, you know, without asking you to blow your own trumpet, does it speak to the need for journalists to hang around, to be invested in one area over a period of years? You know, something that's a bit worrying now that the number of journalists has shrunk severely in New Zealand?
Yeah, it's a great worry that there aren't more journalists looking to these things and it does us all a disservice when we don't know about them and including the government and the department that would have wanted it to. It just becomes a lot clearer when things are written in articles, in my opinion.
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Chapter 6: What were the consequences for public servants involved?
Ka kite.