Australian Immigration Daily News

Is it important to check whether the Department’s Provider Registration and Internal Monitoring System – “PRISMS” – has accurate, up-to-date information concerning the enrolment status of the holder of a student visa?

A recent decision from the Federal Circuit Court, Zhang v Minister for Immigration & Anor (2018) FCCA 1946 (24 July 2018) gives the answer: You better believe it is incredibly important!

In fact, as the case illustrates, proving that the correct information concerning a student’s enrollment can be absolutely vital to overturning a decision by the Department or the Tribunal to cancel a student visa.

The facts of this case actually appeared somewhat dire for the student visa holder in this case, at least on first reading:

He had originally been granted a student visa in October 2011. His student visa was cancelled in March 2016 on the basis that he had breached Condition 8202 by failing to maintain his enrolment in a registered course. In proceeding to cancel his visa, the Department referred to records in the PRISMS system which indicated that he had not been enrolled in a registered course for 18 months.

When the student took his case to the Tribunal, he gave evidence that he had in fact enrolled in a Bachelor of Commerce course at the University of New South Wales in September 2015.

However, the Tribunal declined to accept the student’s evidence that he had re-enrolled at UNSW.

It found that his evidence that he had re-enrolled was “incoherent, uncorroborated and inconsistent” with information available on the PRISMS.

So, was the student’s case “dead on arrival” at the Federal Circuit Court?

No, it wasn’t!

What had happened was that the student had in fact re-enrolled at the UNSW in September 2015, but that contrary to the requirements of section 19 of the Education Services for Overseas Student Act 2000, the University had failed to “upload” the records concerning the student’s re-enrollment onto PRISMS.

It should be noted that in the very important High Court case of Wei V Minister for Immigration and Border Protection (2015) HCA 51 it was held that it is manifestly unjust for the power to cancel a student visa to be exercised on the basis of incorrect information that it held in PRISMS.

In the Zhang  case, the Federal Circuit Court (Judge Emmett) concluded that the Tribunal’s findings concerning the length of time that the student had been away from his studies had been a critical factor in the Tribunal’s decision to affirm the cancellation of the visa – and that the information that the Tribunal had relied on had been incorrect. 

The FCC also found that the incorrect information on PRISMS had affected the Tribunal’s consideration of the applicant’s credibility, and that it might have been more prepared to accept the applicant’s other claims concerning the reasons that he had temporarily suspended his studies if it had accepted that his claims to have re-enrolled had been true.

So, the moral of this story is that if a client’s student visa has been cancelled on the basis of information that is held in PRISMS concerning the student’s enrolment status, and the information in PRISMS is wrong (for example due to a failure by the education provider to upload correct information about the student) then the cancellation decision may be able to be challenged.

So, checking to see whether the cancellation decision is based on incorrect information held in PRISMS may well be the key to preserving a student visa!