Immigration officials deliberately withheld information about a $33m technology project that delivered nothing – and the senior team responsible may still be working in the public service, writes Henry Oliver in today’s excerpt from The Bulletin.

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On Tuesday this week, immigration minister Erica Stanford publicly shamed her own ministry after an independent review revealed that officials at Immigration New Zealand spent $33 million over seven years on a biometrics technology upgrade that delivered nothing. RNZ’s Craig McCulloch reported that Stanford, appearing before MPs at a scrutiny week hearing on Tuesday, said officials had “deliberately withheld information” from both her and the previous government, using “creative accounting” to keep project costs below its approved budget, and split the project into two parts specifically to avoid cabinet oversight.

The project, which began in 2018 without detailed analysis, went through many project managers, ignored warnings it would not deliver, and was ultimately cancelled in 2025. Stanford told MPs the findings were “almost as bad as it gets”. MBIE chief executive Nic Blakeley, sitting next to Stanford at the hearing, apologised to MPs and said he was “extremely disappointed”, accepting accountability on behalf of the department. The review’s author, Greg James, found that ministerial reporting had been “overly optimistic” and occasionally misrepresented the project’s actual status.

‘Complete fiction’

The review found that when officials gave Stanford advice about the project, some of it turned out to be, in her words, “complete fiction”. Funding requests were made without disclosing that earlier requests had been declined. Former Labour immigration minister Andrew Little told RNZ the revelations were “consistent with the kind of relationship I had with immigration officials” – both in relation to this project, which he had declined further funding, and over the accredited employer work visa scheme.

MBIE chief executive Nic Blakeley said he would undertake a stocktake of all projects to check governance was adequate, and said employment investigations could follow depending on what the public service commissioner found. Stanford told RNZ her confidence in MBIE had been knocked by the saga, and noted pointedly that the damning review had been delivered to the ministry two months before it was passed on to her.

Straight to jail

The political response escalated sharply yesterday when foreign minister Winston Peters told reporters the officials responsible should not only lose their jobs but be imprisoned. “Of course they should lose their job. They need to be put in prison as well,” Stuff reported him as saying. “It’s a conspiracy against the people for goodness sake.”

Peters said the revelations were no surprise, telling reporters he had warned Stanford “some time ago” that Immigration New Zealand was the “worst department in this country by miles”. He also questioned why ministerial oversight had failed to catch the problems sooner. Stanford declined to echo Peters’ comments about jail time but would say it was “really important that the public service commissioner does a full investigation.”

Officials still in the public service?

Yesterday, The Post’s Henry Cooke reported that public service commissioner Brian Roche had confirmed the senior people involved in the project were no longer at Immigration, but would not confirm whether or not they remained in the public service. He was, he said, being careful not to prejudge the outcome of his investigation: “If I look like I’m leaping to a level of predetermination, that will undermine the integrity of the report. The integrity is what we’re trying to preserve here.”

Asked about Peters’ prison comments, Roche said he was unaware of them, saying, “I think the courts determine who go to prison.” He also said police involvement was not necessary at this stage, describing the affair as “a report on an IT project that went bad, that looked like people manipulated and bent rules and did that with a lack of the integrity that you would expect.”