Who Needs Rules Anyway?
In my role as a licensed adviser, I live, eat and breathe rules - rules for the Visa process, rules for my own industry and all the separate rules that come with the varying agencies we have to work with, to assist people in making the move. Those rules in many ways give me comfort because, in theory, you know what you need to do and what your clients need to do in order to successfully see them through the process. However it seems that the rules don’t apply to everyone equally or at least they can be bent, broken or just thrown out the window when it suits a particular party - that particular party being INZ.
When the new Accredited Employer Work Visa scheme was launched in May, June and July of this year (there were three separate launch dates), the rules that governed the process were set-out and distributed to all the various parties. Advisers were given a copy of the rules, they were placed online within the formal instructions (the very long list of rules for processing Visas) and they were talked about in a whole string of webinars put on by INZ for the industry and for employers. It was or at least should have been pretty clear to anyone, how the new process was going to work and what was required of both the employers and the Visa applicants throughout that process.
Rather predictably and as I have written about before, the launch of this new policy resulted in utter chaos, largely because the timing was so incredibly off the mark. A new policy, new rules and an entirely new processing platform being rolled out against the border reopening and one of the tightest labour markets in living memory. The chaos was so significant that an Incident Management Team was called in to try and sort out the mess. At the time, I wasn’t quite sure how that team might solve the compounding issues that INZ were facing, although now it seems like we have an answer - just throw the rules out the window.