Hello, my name is Barry Smedts.
I am the Registrar of Immigration Advisers.
It’s great to be able to talk to you in this way through video.
Today, I want to talk to you about recent trends in the industry, migrant survey results for the year, the perceived value of immigration adviser licensing by yourselves as immigration advisers and I just want to bring you up to speed with our numbers.
In regard to what’s happening Immigration Advisers Disciplinary Tribunal decisions, so far there have been 18 decisions – 12 of those cases have been upheld and six have been dismissed.
One case that’s recently been in the media relates to former licensed adviser Artika Devi. There were four separate complaints considered by the tribunal here so there were four separate decisions.
One related to a teacher, that teacher was getting her teaching qualification approved by the teacher’s council.
In the end the teacher’s council cancelled the application and it was found the reason they did that was they had been in contact with Artika Devi on two separate occasions and hadn’t heard back.
There’s also a complaint around a student who later found himself here in an unlawful capacity. In this case, Artika Devi also set debt collectors on the student to collect the licensed immigration fees.
There’s also a case where a representative in the Fiji office conducted the work. That person was not licensed and it was found that Devi was essentially rubber-stamping those applications and the final case was the one that was in the media and the most significant.
There was a couple with three children who were offered jobs in Marlborough and they travelled down to find those jobs didn’t exist.
Through the goodwill of a proprietor of a campsite where they were staying, they were loaned the money to get back home. Devi was struck off the register, her licence was cancelled for two years and the total compensation for those four cases was about $35,000.
There’s some important lessons to take you through which you need to take away and make sure your business practises follow the code.
In this case, the tribunal found there was a failure to provide a written agreement and receipts detailing the services that were going to be provided, there was a failure to carry out client instructions, a failure to communicate with the client and it was found that the adviser retained personal documents including birth, marriage certificates and qualifications.
I now want to move onto complaining about another adviser.
There’s an assumption out there that only migrants can make complaints, that’s not the case.
Often you are going to receive clients that have gone through another adviser and things have gone badly. What I want to urge you to do is get those clients to complain to us directly or complain on their behalf so we can ensure the reputation of good advisers is maintained.
There’s a number of you out there who are wondering about Continuing Professional Development and I know offshore people are crying out for it.
We have entered into a contract with the Bay of Plenty Polytechnic who are working in partnership with the University of Victoria Melbourne and the University of Waikato.
They are going to be developing a qualification for us called the Graduate Certificate in New Zealand Immigration Advice. It is going to be an online course that can be done fully online from anywhere in the world and it will be split into four separate courses. Each course will have several modules. The four courses are:
As licensed advisers, you can complete the whole programme and I certainly urge you to do that or you can complete parts of it that you find most relevant to your Continuing Professional Development.
Completion of it is extremely flexible. You can complete your chosen course both part time or full time.
If you are interested go to the Bay of Plenty Polytechnic’s website www.boppoly.ac.nz and download the full brochure.
The next item I want to talk to you about is the migrant survey.
This is the third year we have run it. It is a benchmark survey. It’s the survey that tests the performance of the legislation that you are bound by over time. It’s a really important one and we try to ask the same questions each year.
This year it went out to 5,781 applicants and we had a response rate of 16 per cent.
Here’s a range of verbatim responses from both licensed and exempt immigration advisers.
On the positive side:
“All information given to me was up-to-date, concise and easy to understand. Requests for information or for detailed explanations were supplied immediately. They were very professional.”
“They were honest and professional and their fees were reasonable.”
There were also some people who were dissatisfied. Here a couple of their verbatim responses:
“I had to pay a lot of money and ended up doing it all myself and only going over the paperwork to check everything was included. I was the one looking for all the necessary information and getting in touch with relevant bodies to obtain the correct information.”
And another one:
“My adviser left the agency he worked for and that agency didn’t have anybody else with a license and they just left me to look after my application and I had already paid my full fees in advance.”
Those last two examples of negative responses I see that sort of thing coming through in the complaints that I’m referring on to the tribunal so really think of those responses and make sure that your businesses have the right sort of safeguards in place that are required by the code.
Now onto the quality of service expected.
Expectations of service by both licensed and exempt advisers are tracking up with 84% of clients expecting a good or very good service from their licensed adviser.
Overall satisfaction with immigration advisers is the same as last year, which was high at 75 per cent. When looking at adviser category, the exempt advisers are tracking ahead of licensed advisers on very satisfied they sit at 50% compared to 43% by licensed advisers.
While licensed advisers and exempt advisers are the same overall, the exempts are ahead on very satisfied and that’s something, licensed advisers, I encourage you to try to improve your game on.
When we look at overall satisfaction over time that’s largely unchanged from 2009 and 2010 results using both licensed and exempt advisers.
When we look at overall satisfaction by location, as in previous years satisfaction is similar by application and adviser location.
While results are not statistically different to 2010, the indicative increasing trends are evident for all client types except those who made their application from offshore.
So when we look at overall satisfaction by type of application, this is a positive increase so well done.
In satisfaction amongst residence and permanent residence applications that’s up from 72% to 85% satisfied.
When we look at satisfaction by age and gender, the graph is pretty self-explanatory but it shows the under 30s are the least satisfied group.
The highest performance areas sat at 91 % were:
It was followed closely by being confident that personal information would be protected sitting at 88%.
As a general rule, people should focus on targeting areas of improvement that sit below 65%. Last year there were two areas which sat below 65% and that’s providing information about the Treaty and providing services at a reasonable cost.
There were two areas where licensed advisers outperformed exempt advisers and they were in the areas of returning personal information/documents without delay and making it clear at the outset what fees the applicant would be in for and I would expect that because those are provisions that you are bound to by the code.
Now moving onto complaints, this graph sets out the reasons why a client might complain and most of the reasons now being that the adviser was negligent.
The overall performance has been maintained at the high 2010 levels with an increase in two of the service attributes:
There was a decrease in one service attribute and I’ve also highlighted that one because of its score – providing information regarding the Treaty of Waitangi and Maori customs and traditions so that’s definitely one to focus one because its both a low score and it’s a score that’s decreased over last year.
Now clients’ likely to recommend their adviser to family or friends is now up to 82% - that’s a really significant improvement over the 2009 benchmark result so that’s fantastic.
Two thirds of clients who used an adviser received a code of conduct and 80% of clients who used an adviser got a written agreement.
This I found disturbing because it means one in three migrants are not getting a code of conduct and one in five are not receiving a written agreement.
The main areas identified for improvement by your customers are:
Now I want to move onto the survey that measures the perceived value of licensing by you the adviser.
These are all excellent results from my perspective and show that immigration advisers clearly think licensing has improved things.
Now I want to move onto licensed adviser numbers.
We currently have 500 advisers of which 342 are based in New Zealand and 158 are offshore.
We have also referred some 60 complaints to the Immigration Advisers Complaints and Disciplinary Tribunal.
This concludes my presentation. Thank you very much and it’s a privilege to communicate with you in this way.