Efficiency of the Processing of Applications for Citizenship by Conferral
Entities audited: Department of Home Affairs
Introduction
2.1
The Department of Home Affairs (Home Affairs) administers the Australian citizenship program and citizenship legislation. Home Affairs’ national office has overarching responsibility for governance of the citizenship program, including the development and application of relevant policies, procedures, systems and templates.
2.2
Persons can apply for one of four types of Australian citizenship by application: descent; adoption; resumption; and conferral. ‘Citizenship by conferral’ means to be given citizenship by meeting eligibility requirements. The citizenship by conferral stream is the most common form of application, comprising 92 per cent of all applications for citizenship received in 2017-18.
2.3
There has been a steady increase in conferral applications received in each of 2014-15, 2015-16 and 2016-17, with a more substantial increase in 2017-18. Of the 259 815 applications for citizenship lodged in 2017-18, 92 per cent sought citizenship by conferral.
2.4
Home Affairs assesses citizenship applications against the identity and character requirements set out in the Migration Act 1958 as part of an individual’s visa application and have therefore determined them to be of good character. Additional checking is undertaken as part of the individual’s citizenship application.
2.5
The Australian Citizenship Act 2007 requires the Minister to be satisfied that the person is of good character, and be satisfied of the identity of a person, ‘at the time of the Minister’s decision on the application’. Even if a person is eligible for Australian citizenship, the Act may require the Minister to refuse an application on grounds relating to non-satisfaction of identity, national security, non-presence in Australia, offences or recent cessation of Australian citizenship.
2.6
The Australian Citizenship Act 2007 also states that, if a person makes an application for citizenship by conferral, the Minister ‘must, by writing, approve or refuse to approve the person becoming an Australian citizen’. The legislation does not provide for a time limit on when this decision must be taken.
2.7
Most of the Minister’s decision-making powers under the Australian Citizenship Act, however, ‘have been delegated to departmental officers at Australian Public Service Level 4 or above’.
2.8
Applications for citizenship by conferral are usually processed and decided by officers in the department’s nine Visa and Citizenship Offices across the country. These officers conduct a number of checks in relation to identity and character to ascertain that applicants meet all prescribed requirements. The ANAO audit reported that 300 full-time equivalent staff were working in the program area in March 2018.
Audit Rationale
2.9
The ANAO stated in its report that the audit was prompted by public and parliamentary interest in the time taken to process applications.
2.10
It stated that organisations such as the Office of the Commonwealth Ombudsman and the Refugee Council of Australia had issued reports in relation to the matter. The ANAO also pointed to interest in the matter by Members of Parliament, though did not refer to specific examples.
2.11
The ANAO further observed that, in BMF16 v Minister for Immigration and Border Protection [2016], the Federal Court of Australia (the court) stated that there had been unreasonable delay in deciding applications for citizenship by conferral in the case of two plaintiffs. In particular, the court identified that lengthy and unexplained periods of inaction were indicative of unreasonable delay.
2.12
Further, the ANAO stated that the Committee had ‘identified ‘citizenship function administration’ as an audit priority of the Parliament’ in May 2017.
Audit Scope
2.13
The objective of the ANAO audit was to examine the efficiency of the processing of applications for citizenship by conferral by Home Affairs.
2.14
The ANAO adopted the following criteria to form a conclusion against the audit objective:
Have applications for citizenship by conferral been processed in a time efficient manner?
Have applications for citizenship by conferral been processed in a resource-efficient manner?
2.15
The audit scope covered the processing of applications from receipt to decision-making stage.
2.16
In conducting the audit, the ANAO utilised a methodology including examination of Home Affairs’ records and data, interviews with key departmental officers and targeted testing of samples of randomly selected applications.
2.17
The ANAO conducted the audit at a cost of $288 000, utilising three staff members.
Overall Audit Conclusion
2.18
The audit report concluded that ‘[a]pplications for citizenship by conferral have not been processed efficiently by the Department of Home Affairs’.
2.19
The ANAO reported that ‘[a]pplications have not been processed in a time-efficient matter’. The audit stated that significant delays were identified in processing times, and ‘long delays are evident between applications being lodged and decisions being taken on whether or not to confer citizenship’. The ANAO further identified long periods of inactivity for both complex and non-complex applications.
2.20
Applications for citizenship by conferral ‘have not been processed in a resource-efficient manner’. The report stated that ‘[t]he department has a suite of initiatives in train that are designed to improve efficiency but implementation has been slow. The ANAO found that Home Affairs was ‘not checking the quality of the decisions taken’ to approve or refuse Australian citizenship.
2.21
The ANAO reported that:
[Home Affairs] has not set external key performance indicators [KPIs] to inform Parliament and other stakeholders of how efficient it has been in processing conferral applications.
2.22
The ANAO made three recommendations in its report. Two recommendations related to the setting of performance indicators and standards associated with processing times. The third recommendation related to the development of a revised funding model for citizenship activities that is based on updated activity levels and efficient costs.
Performance Measurement and Management
2.23
The ANAO examined the performance of Home Affairs’ management of applications for citizenship by conferral. In examining the entity’s performance, the audit examined the rates of applications lodged, decided, and on hand per year since 2014-15, as demonstrated in Figure 2.1.
2.24
The ANAO found that the ‘rate of decisions has been declining, falling far behind the lodgement rate [and that a] backlog of applications on hand had resulted’. The audit stated:
Over the past four financial years the number of applications for citizenship by conferral:
lodged increased by 25 per cent to be 239,413 in 2017-18;
decided decreased by 47 per cent to be 101,422 in 2017-18; and
on hand increased by 771 per cent to be 244,765 at 30 June 2018.
2.25
The ANAO also examined data in relation to citizenship tests, and found that over the same time period the number of test applicants had risen while the number of tests administered fell.
2.26
The audit further found that Home Affairs ‘had not been achieving its target timeframe for deciding applications (of making 80 per cent of decisions within 80 days of the application being lodged’. Prior to 2017, the Home Affairs website contained information about its service standard for the processing of applications for citizenship by conferral. Between November 2009 and June 2014, this was set as 60 days, which was later extended to 80 days in July 2014. Currently, there is no publicly available information in relation to Home Affairs’ service standard relating to the processing of applications for citizenship by conferral.
2.27
The audit identified a number of factors which contributed to Home Affairs’ performance in this respect, including:
increased integrity screening of applications for citizenship by conferral introduced from June 2017, which resulted in longer periods of time required for some applicants to be screened;
an increase in the number of citizenship by conferral applications received in the period between April 2017 and June 2018, corresponding with the proposal of legislative changes to citizenship requirements;
periods of unexplained inactivity in some cases from March to April 2015 and during the 2015-16 reporting period; and
ineffective use of departmental processing staff and systems.
2.28
The ANAO recommended that Home Affairs ‘establish and monitor performance standards that address periods of processing inactivity, including the length of time between an application being received and substantive processing work commencing’.
2.29
Home Affairs agreed in principle with this recommendation, explaining that a number of system-wide reforms to the citizenship program were being rolled out, and as a result, they would examine potential additional reporting capabilities. Home Affairs disagreed with the ANAO’s finding that the processing of citizenship applications had not been carried out effectively, although provided no explanation regarding the objection to the audit’s findings.
2.30
In its submission to the Committee, Home Affairs noted that it disagreed with the Auditor-General’s conclusion that applications had not been processed efficiently. The submission then identified a number of changes that had been made to improve performance and efficiency, such as:
the completion of an internal business process/practice review, which “examined citizenship work effort and efficient service delivery”, conducted in order to establish an evidence base regarding conferral cost and staffing systems;
the introduction of Internal Performance Targets in April 2019, which Home Affairs reported had led to improvements in performance and would be regularly reviewed;
reviewing integrity screening processes to enable improved efficiency in processing applications; and
a number of technological changes, including new tools to monitor case progression.
2.31
Home Affairs advised that these reforms had resulted in marked improvements in performance and efficiency. Further, Home Affairs reported that staff productivity had improved by 80 per cent between the first quarter of 2018-19 and the same period of 2019-20, and that significantly higher numbers of citizenship application finalisations had been recorded. Critically, the number of applications being finalised was reported to be higher than application lodgements, which reduced the number of applications awaiting decision.
Publication of KPIs
2.32
Home Affairs previously publicised on its website the service standard for the processing of citizenship applications by conferral. The service standard in place from November 2009 to June 2014 was to decide applications within 60 days of lodgement. This timeframe was increased to 80 days on 1 July 2014. The KPI was 80 per cent of decisions made within the service standard. In November 2016, however, Home Affairs sought and received ministerial approval to remove the service standard from publication, and instead set an internal target for processing times. Home Affairs removed the service standard from its website in March 2017, and replaced it with regular publication of average processing times or ‘global processing times’.
2.33
The ANAO expressed significant concern in relation to Home Affairs’ approach to the KPIs. It identified two main shortcomings with the entity’s approach. Firstly, the current published processing times show ‘what level the department is performing but do not state at what level the department should be performing’. Secondly, the time taken to refuse applications for citizenship was not considered as part of the approach used.
2.34
The ANAO recommended that Home Affairs re-introduce externally reported KPIs of the time taken to decide applications, and expand on current information provided regarding published processing times to also report the length of time being taken to decide applications per month, including decisions to refuse applications.
2.35
Home Affairs subsequently disagreed with the ANAO’s recommendation. It stated that:
The Department already publishes on its website meaningful and realistic timeframes from lodgement to acquisition of conferral cases within the 75th and 90th percentiles. This practice will continue and will be expanded to differentiate the timeframe from application to finalisation of decision and then finalised (approval) to acquisition (ceremony), to provide greater clarity around these separate, but related, processes. The Department does not consider that a fixed Key Performance Indicator would be meaningful to our clients in this context, noting that each case is assessed on its individual merits with substantial variation in processing times.
2.36
Home Affairs cited two issues in explaining its reluctance to publish the information suggested by the ANAO. Firstly, Home Affairs stated that the use of KPIs in relation to the service standard has previously resulted in clients incorrectly assuming that this figure was a maximum processing time. Home Affairs was of the view that this had led to a substantial amount of correspondence and complaints from clients, resulting in the diversion of resources to process applications.
2.37
Secondly, in relation to the publication of refusal of applications for citizenship timeframes, Home Affairs stated that:
Refusal of a citizenship application is often due to complex issues which regularly take a significant period of time to properly consider, leading to increased processing times for these applicants compared with approved applications. Were the Department to separately publish refusal processing times, it is likely that clients would make incorrect assumptions about the possible future outcome of their application, particularly if the time taken to process their application passes the timeframes published on the website for finalisations.
2.38
Home Affairs expressed concern that clients incorrectly assuming that their application would be refused may increase correspondence and complaints, and consequently divert resourcing from the processing of applications.
2.39
Home Affairs subsequently advised that it ‘now have internal KPIs’. These KPIs, however, would not be made public due to Home Affairs’ concerns regarding how clients would interpret the KPI.
2.40
In reply, the ANAO accepted that Home Affairs’ proposal to differentiate existing processing timeframes to incorporate the time between lodgement to finalisation ‘would adequately address the second part of the recommendation’.
2.41
The ANAO, however, expressed concern regarding Home Affairs’ unwillingness to provide external KPI results, particularly in relation to its implications for transparency and accountability. It stated:
The lack of externally reported key performance indicators for processing time efficiency means transparent and meaningful information is not being provided to the Parliament and other stakeholders so as to hold Home Affairs accountable for its performance.
2.42
The ANAO also stated that the publication of processing times for applications for citizenship by conferral is practiced in a number of other countries, such as the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand.
2.43
The ANAO explained to the Committee that KPIs would provide Home Affairs with an insight into its own performance, in addition to providing external observers with information that assists in judging whether the results being achieved were acceptable:
One of the things we observe in the report is that, up to a point in time, the department did have its own KPIs which included a target as to how quickly they should be doing things. The point we’ve made is that what they’ve brought in in place of that is now essentially factual reporting on how long it’s taking them to actually undertake the processing effort … the big failing in that KPI, as we see it, is that the department hasn’t said what is its target time. If it’s currently achieving 23 months at the 90th percentile, is that something the department sees as being acceptable performance or not? We don’t know, and they’re not stating.
System Adequacy
2.44
In BMF16 v Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, the Federal Court found that two plaintiffs’ applications for citizenship by conferral had been subject to unreasonable delay. The ANAO sought to identify whether Home Affairs’ systems were adequate for the purpose of avoiding unreasonable delay. While the ANAO could not produce a ‘reliable report’ from the Home Affairs’ processing system regarding case inactivity, it instead manually examined the records of 15 applicants at random to assess Home Affairs’ systems.
2.45
The audit found that a number of systems designed to monitor case progression had not been utilised effectively. The ANAO stated that Home Affairs:
did not have processes in place to monitor and address periods of processing inactivity, including the length of time between an application being received and substantive processing work commencing.
2.46
The audit also found that, in the selection of cases scrutinised, periods of unexplained inactivity ranged from nine months to 22 months, averaging 15 months.
2.47
While the ANAO acknowledged that for some cases this may be due to complexity in the case particulars, in other cases it was not explainable. The ANAO instanced one example of a non-complex application assessed as valid two days after lodgement which had no further action 26 months later. The ANAO further stated that Home Affairs had advised that the vast majority of applications were non-complex.
2.48
The ANAO recommended that Home Affairs establish and monitor performance standards in relation to periods of processing inactivity. Home Affairs advised that a number of changes were being made to address issues of unreasonable delay, including:
moving to an internal dashboard system, which assesses cases by time, location and stage of progression to alert senior management to delays;
transitioning from a Total Case Management model (where one officer works on a case from beginning to completion) to a Global Case Management model (where multiple case officers may work on a case throughout its life); and
introducing automated programs such as a Program Management Pipeline Tool (or PROMPT) which data-matches to assess case risk.
Stakeholder Engagement
2.49
During the inquiry, two areas of concern were raised in relation to stakeholder engagement: engagement with external agencies and engagement with clients.
External Stakeholders
2.50
The ANAO reported a distinct increase in processing times after the introduction of increased integrity screening checks, which involved a number of external agencies conducting background checks on applicants. The audit reported that the rate of applications for citizenship by conferral dropped immediately following the introduction of increased integrity screening checks in June 2017.
2.51
The ANAO found that the integrity screening process was set up prior to agreements being established with partner agencies regarding bulk checking systems and the extent to which information could be disclosed and used in a visa decision. The ANAO further observed that it was not clear whether an agreement with the external entities had been achieved.
2.52
Home Affairs officials responded that the integrity screening process involved a referral to security agencies such as the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission. Home Affairs also advised that out of approximately 167 000 applications referred to external agencies, one was found to be problematic.
Client Engagement
2.53
A recommendation was made by the Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia regarding Home Affairs’ approach to client engagement when processing applications for citizenship by conferral. Home Affairs advised that clients who contacted the department regarding their application were responded to by the global feedback unit via a client’s user account. Additionally, Home Affairs stated that the citizenship program was being examined through a number of options to improve communication with clients regarding their applications. In relation to this process, Home Affairs stated:
We are exploring options to:
incorporate additional processing stages into clients’ online ImmiAccounts to better demonstrate progression of applications;
provide more regular client communication to reassure clients regarding the status of individual applications; and
facilitate access to more detailed information to call centre staff so that they are able to provide more meaningful updates to clients on the progress of their citizenship applications.
Concluding Comment
2.54
The Committee agrees with the Auditor-General’s conclusion that ‘[a]pplications for citizenship by conferral have not been processed efficiently by the Department of Home Affairs’.
2.55
Since the conclusion of the audit, Home Affairs has made progress in increasing productivity and efficiency, thereby increasing the numbers of applications for conferral of citizenship being processed and finalised.
2.56
The Committee welcomes the changes that Home Affairs is in the process of implementing to its systems which are intended to address issues that caused unreasonable delays to citizenship by conferral applications.
2.57
The Committee acknowledges that Home Affairs is in the process of implementing changes to its systems which are intended to address issues that may have caused unreasonable delays to citizenship by conferral applications.
2.58
In relation to the use of shared information between agencies, it remains unclear whether an agreement to share information between partner agencies exists for the purposes of assessing applications for citizenship by conferral.
2.59
The Committee acknowledges the ANAO’s concerns about Home Affairs’ unpublished KPIs. The ANAO stated that the publication of such indicators would assist Home Affairs to identify its performance targets and demonstrate to external stakeholders the standard it sets for its citizenship program.
2.60
The information currently published only provides a factual description of the length of time an application takes to be processed. It does not show what standard Home Affairs is setting itself, or enable open scrutiny of whether the target set is appropriate or if it is being met. As observed by the ANAO, other countries with similar visa systems publish this information openly.
2.61
The Committee recognises the concerns raised by Home Affairs in relation to the diversion of resources due to excessive correspondence and complaints regarding performance against particular timeframes. The Committee, however, suggests that timely and continual communication with clients regarding the progression of their application could assist in mitigating this issue.
2.62
The Committee recommends, in line with Recommendation 1, Australian National Audit Office, Report No. 25 (2018-19), Efficiency of the Processing of Applications for Citizenship by Conferral, that the Department of Home Affairs:
reintroduce externally reported key performance indicators of the time taken to decide applications for citizenship by conferral; and
expand its published processing times to also report the time being taken to decide applications for citizenship by conferral per month, including decisions to refuse citizenship.
2.63
The Committee recommends that the Department of Home Affairs implement an electronic system in which applicants may track the progress of their application for citizenship by conferral remotely, and that this system be updated weekly, to ensure that timely advice is provided to applicants on the status of their application.