The Australian Tax Office (ATO) is concerned about departing sc457 visa workers and foreign students being targeted by tax fraudsters and therefore intends to undertake detailed investigations of DIBP records to identify the fraudsters, according to a report in The Courier-Mail.

It is reported that given the concern, the ATO will be sieving through the department of immigration’s databases under the data matching program to “detect, and deal with compliance risks within the visa holding population.”

An earlier report by the ATO indicated that, “Data from DIBP will be used in ATO risk detection models to select populations for administrative action relating to tax return integrity, income tax and goods and services tax non-compliance and fraud.”

According to that report, based on those identified risks, the ATO intends to acquire visa information for visas granted in the period 1 July 2013 to 30 June 2015 and future periods between 1 July 2015 and 30 June 2017. This means previously acquired data for the period 1 July 2013 to 30 June 2014 will be refreshed in the new table structure in an effort to take advantage of opportunities with new risk detection models.

The report was scant and did not say if the main concern was over money laundering by organised criminal gangs or just the underpayment of taxes by businesses.

It is “so so so” important that the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (formerly the Migration Review Tribunal) “get the facts right”!

And when it doesn’t, the mistake about the facts can cause the AAT to commit “jurisdictional error” which can in turn prompt the federal courts to “quash” (overturn) the AAT’s decision.

That this is “so” was illustrated by a judgment of Judge Manousaridis of the Federal Circuit Court in the recently-decided case of Srestha v Minister for Immigration & Anor (2015) FCCA 22262 (28 August 2015). 

Consumer Protection?

There have been some subtle changes to the registration certificates for migration agents and the evidence of that registration as shown as shown in the registration certificates below.

A registered migration agent is obliged to have in their office, prominently displayed, evidence of the fact of their registration as a migration agent and a copy of the Code of Conduct.

Presumably this is to avoid a situation where an unsuspecting member of the public would attend the offices of a person giving immigration assistance but is not in fact registered. Thus, the certificate which evidences the registration would then act to allay the concerns that the member of the public may have about dealing with an unregistered person.

Can a child who is born in Australia to parents who are not Australian citizens or permanent residents acquire Australian citizenship if there are insurmountable practical difficulties in the way of securing citizenship in the parents’ home country? 

The Administrative Appeals Tribunal was called upon to consider this issue in the recently-decided case of KKRG and Minister for Immigration and Border Protection (Citizenship) AATA 635 (27 August 2015).

As RMAs may be aware, there is a clearly-defined pathway under the Australian Citizenship Act2007 for a child whose parents are not themselves Australian citizens to obtain Australian citizenship her/himself.

Typically, the department cancels between 8,000 and 9000 visas annually, but in the latest figures released by the DIBP for the year ending June 2015, there has been a 30 per cent increase in the number of cancellations, according to a report in The Australian.

The visas of 1793 Chinese students were cancelled making them the highest risk group. With 1160 visa cancellations, South Korean students were next, followed in number by students from India, Vietnam and Thailand.

The total number of student visas issued rose by 2 per cent, from 292,060 to 299,540.

Low-quality education providers, unscrupulous education agents, and the overly complex current student visa framework have been blamed for these large number of visa cancellations.

Last month, two colleges - St Stephen Institute of Technology and Symbiosis Institute of Technical Education - were shut down after allegations that they were not providing education, but were “being used to source student visas for Indian students who then go to work…”