‘Ineffective’: Home Affairs hammered over trafficking investigation failures

The Home Affairs Department has failed to effectively regulate migration agents, botching investigations into serious complaints including at least one allegation of sex trafficking.

A damning Commonwealth auditor-general report accused the Home Affairs-managed Office of Migration Agents Registration Authority of a host of failures in supervising the migration agents who facilitate the arrival of vulnerable people into the country.

“Home Affairs’ regulation of migration agents is not effective. There is an absence of regulatory action to monitor the activities of registered agents, and the department does not take timely and effective action in response to complaints it receives about the activities of registered agents,” the Australian National Audit Office report, published on Wednesday, found.

It found the department did not properly monitor agents and had not used the data it had available to take risks from poor conduct out of the immigration system.

It found in one example, the department failed to properly investigate an agent suspected of sex trafficking after it had been alerted by the Australian Border Force. The review also urged an overhaul of an approval system that allowed agents to have their registrations automatically approved even when facing numerous complaints.

The findings come after Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil pledged to overhaul the integrity of the migration system following reports by this masthead  and 60 Minutes exposing the way criminals hijacked visa schemes for their own gain.

Stephanie Foster is the secretary of the Department of Home Affairs.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

That reporting also led to an influential review conducted by former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon, who found weaknesses in the visa system had enabled sex trafficking to thrive and dodgy education providers to set up so-called ghost colleges to funnel students into low-paid work.

In the suspected sex-trafficking example, the auditor-general found the department had failed to use its full range of powers to investigate the agent, and ignored a previous complaint relating to human trafficking.

“The agent was named in [Australian Border Force] Operation Resonate in November 2020 in relation to migration agents facilitating the exploitation of foreign national sex workers,” the watchdog reported on Wednesday.

“In dismissing the complaint, the department did not address all of the relevant substantive matters related to the complaint … [and] it did not address the allegations identified in Operation Resonate.”

The auditor-general noted that while the department did not prepare a “case investigation summary” for its officers, it did prepare a “media-handling strategy”.

The office also found the department used an automated process to renew the registration of agents, approving multiple agents who were subject to complaints of fraudulent behaviour.

In other examples, the department took five years to dismiss a complaint against an agent facing several accusations of aiding false protection claims, and also dismissed complaints against an agent relating to cash-for-visa arrangements due to a minor technicality in the process.

In October, O’Neil announced a $50 million injection into the department to boost its ability to monitor compliance, a move to strengthen the fit-and-proper-person test for registered migration agents, and said the Office of the Migration Agents Registration Authority’s ability to sanction agents would be improved.

Labor MP Julian Hill, chair of the cross-parliamentary committee on public accounts and audits, said the revelations in the auditor-general’s report warranted a public inquiry, adding his constituents had been the victims of shoddy advice from migration agents.

“We’ve inherited both [a] migration system and department underfunded and riddled with integrity issues,” Hill said.

In her response to the report, Home Affairs secretary Stephanie Foster agreed the Office of the Migration Agents Registration Authority had scope to strengthen but disagreed that the office didn’t effectively respond to complaints. “Allegations of non-compliance, even when serious integrity concerns may be alleged through intelligence reporting, are not conclusive evidence that OMARA can immediately use to prove … that the agent had engaged in misconduct,” she said.

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