Applying for a New Zealand visa from the UK? What its software faults mean for your file

Visa guide · 2026-09-30 · 4 min read

A woman and man review papers beside a laptop at a wooden dining table in a bright home.

When you send off a visa application, you probably imagine a caseworker going through it page by page. New Zealand has just discovered that this does not always happen. Briefings to the government show that faults in Immigration New Zealand's online system approved some applications without any officer assessing them at all.

Nothing here suggests genuine applicants are in trouble. But if you are planning to work in New Zealand from the UK, it is a useful reminder of how to protect your own file.

How a duplicated step skipped the caseworker

The system concerned is ADEPT, Immigration New Zealand's online visa processing platform, in use since 2022. A technical fault sometimes allowed the same automated step to run more than once on an application. That created duplicated actions and, in some cases, skipped the point where an officer should have looked at the file.

A review afterwards found two groups affected:

visitor visas: 32 went through with no officer review, spread over roughly three years
Job Check applications: 23 were cleared in 2022 without anyone assessing them

The Job Check is the stage where an accredited employer shows it tried to recruit a New Zealander before hiring from overseas. Every one of those visitor visas has now been looked at again by technical advisers. Of the holders, twenty had already made their trip with no problems recorded. Risk factors led to six files being reopened for a full assessment, and in one case the advice was to decline.

Other hiccups on the same platform

Problem	What happened
Health screening gap	A question about past residence linked to tuberculosis was missing for 364 people applying in 2025 for the multiple entry visitor visa for parents and grandparents; 295 of them got their visa. The risk to any one person was judged fairly low, and the people concerned are to be contacted.
Employer dashboard errors	When accreditation lapsed and was then renewed, around 2,300 firms could no longer see their migrant staff on the dashboard, so they struggled to resend job tokens or tell the agency a worker had left.
Submission fault in August 2026	An update meant some visitor visa drafts would not submit once a second person was added to them. It was fixed for good within days, though nobody knows how many applicants were caught.

Approvals nobody planned

The official line was that machines could help say yes, but only people would say no. The law does permit automated decisions, yet the agency had reportedly never used them, and in 2025 it put itself around two years away from having the data and testing needed. These approvals were not a planned rollout; the system simply did something no one intended.

There is a wider IT story too. Ministers sent the $336 million Our Future Services programme back for a new business case after its projected savings were overstated by $134 million, and want a report before April 2027.

What each reader should take from it

Applicants: the concern is consistency and oversight, not people being wrongly refused. A quick approval does not prove your file was checked as thoroughly as it should have been, and errors found later can lead to follow-up contact.

Employers and sponsors: compare your dashboard with your own records of who you employ and which job tokens have been issued, especially if your accreditation has lapsed and been renewed.

Anyone planning a move: systems and policies change everywhere. Keep your own copies of submissions, confirmations, medical results and letters, whatever the platform shows.

Good habits for any online application

Save a copy of every page and confirmation you submit.
Answer every health and character question in full, even when the system does not prompt you. If a UK police certificate is requested, it comes from ACRO Criminal Records Office.
Reply promptly to any request for more information.
Check your application status regularly rather than assuming silence means all is well.
Get qualified advice if anything looks odd.

The Immigration New Zealand website is the place to check your application and the current rules. Technology can speed things up, but it needs testing and human oversight, and your best protection is an honest, well-documented application.

For more on New Zealand visas, read what the immigration overhaul means for you and how the shelved criminal record sharing plan affects applicants, or browse current jobs.

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