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BDM (Deaths)/INZ Deceased Temporary Visa Holders Programme
• Annual Report
• Technical information
• System description
• Historical activity
Annual report
Purpose: To identify and remove or update the records of people who are deceased from Immigration New Zealand (INZ's) database of overstayer and temporary permit holder population.
Year commenced: 2007
Features: Data transferred by CD every six months.
BDM disclosure to INZ: BDM provides information from the Deaths Register covering the six months prior to the extract date. The death extract includes full name at birth, full name at death, gender, birth date, death date, country of birth and number of years lived in New Zealand.
2008/09 activity:
| Records received for matching | 29,119 |
| Possible matches identified | 296 |
| Records marked as deceased - overstayer list | 145 |
| Records marked as deceased - temporary visa holders' list | 83 |
| Total number of records updated as deceased | 228 |
Technical information
| Information matching provision | Births, Deaths, and Marriages Registration Act 1995, s.78A |
| Year authorised | 2001 |
| Programme type | Updating data Detecting illegal behaviour |
System description
BDM provides Immigration New Zealand with a six monthly extract of deaths information on an encrypted CD. Each record of a deceased person can include the full name at birth, full name at death, date of birth, gender, birth place, death date, and number of years lived in New Zealand.
INZ imports the deaths information into a temporary file housed within the DoL internal network. The matching process then passes the death information through a series of matching cycles where the matching criteria is progressively widened to allow for less exact matches to be considered. Potent matches are written to a match report where they are manually checked by an INZ staff member before being accepted or rejected.
Where an individual on a temporary visa appears to have died, INZ annotate the record as "deceased" and place an alert on the record stating that the information is unverified and that no action should be taken regarding the person unless independent proof of the death (or to the contrary) is received. Annotating the record as "deceased" also prevents the record from passing from the temporary visa list onto the overstayer list once the temporary visa expires. Where a match identifies a deceased individual who is already on the overstayer list, the record is updated to "deceased" so that no further enforcement effort is made to locate that person. No notices of adverse action are sent for this programme. INZ believe that adding the annotation and alert on matched records does not constitute an adverse action.
Historical activity
| Death records for the period | 01/01/1976-31/07/06 | 01/08/06-31/07/07 | 01/08/07-31/01/08 |
| Records received for matching | 820,621 | 28,512 | 14,779 |
| Number of possible matches identified |
3,095 | 307 | 151 |
| Number of records marked as deceased on the overstayer list |
1,794 | 135 | 52 |
| Number of records marked as deceased on the temporary visa holders list |
11 | 23 | 56 |
| Total number of records updated as deceased |
1,805 | 158 | 108 |