Auditor General damns Home Affairs’ handling of migration agents after finding inadequate supervision and poor complaint handling.
The Home Affairs department has failed to effectively regulate migration agents, botching investigations into serious complaints including at least one allegation of sex trafficking.
It found the department did not properly monitor agents and had not used the data it had available to take risks from poor conduct out of the immigration system. The auditor-general noted that while the department did not prepare a “case investigation summary” for its officers it did prepare a “media handling strategy”.
In October, O’Neil announced a $50 million injection into the department to boost its ability to monitor compliance, a move to strengthen the fit-and-proper-person test for registered migration agents, and said the Office of the Migration Agents Registration Authority’s ability to sanction agents would be improved.
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