Australian Immigration Daily News

The following information has been received by Migration Alliance from the DIBP:

'Clients may receive requests for further information in relation to an application that are not signed off by a particular case officer.

As you would be aware, the Department has a responsibility to continuously look at doing its work in more efficient ways.

One of our challenges is to ensure that cases are decision ready so that when they are allocated to case officers they can be finalised on the spot. Requests for further information are currently being made by case officers but the same case officer who issues the request may not necessarily be the case officer who ends up making a decision on the application.

For requests for further information we will be using generic signature blocks, as we have done in the sample you have provided, in instances where we are running trials of alternative processing models. Doing so helps us to better organise our work (responses can be auto - sorted according to signature blocks).

All decision records and notifications related to decisions to grant or refuse visas will however include names and position numbers as such decisions are made under S65 delegations.'

Migration Alliance would like to thank the Departmental Director who provided this information quickly and in great detail.  It is sincerely appreciated.