Tens of thousands of applications were given to inactive immigration officers or placeholder codes that were no longer functional by Canada’s Immigration Department. some who have processed papers from airports and visa offices all over the world and who last logged in up to 16 years ago.
As of February of this year, 59,456 open, pending, or re-opened applications were assigned to 779 former employees or dormant computer placeholder codes used to keep applicants in line, according to information provided by CBC in response to an ATIP request (a legal method of requesting information from government organizations).
Only the placeholder codes on GCMS notes allow for the public identification of IRCC officers. A person may use the ATIP to get GCMS notes from IRCC regarding their immigration applications. These notes contain correspondence with and from IRCC, documents submitted by the applicant, in-depth notes from the officer reviewing the file, and other pertinent data.
IRCC has assigned applications to inactive users for reasons that are now unknown; nonetheless, according to CBC, IRCC was unable to remove these inactive users from the GCMS because doing so would compromise their traceability.
When an officer is marked as inactive, the immigration department explained to CBC that “it signifies they are no longer using the system and their access is no longer available.”
This occurs while the nation of North America struggles with massive immigration backlogs involving millions of applicants.
According to IRCC data, the backlog decreased from 2.4 million last month to slightly over 2.2 million this month.
According to the IRCC, they delivered 4.3 million final judgments for citizens, temporary residents, and permanent residents between January and October 2022 as opposed to 2.3 million final decisions during the same time last year.
By the end of March 2023, the Canadian citizenship organization claims it wants to have a backlog across all business lines of less than 50%.
For the majority of permanent resident programs, IRCC started the shift to 100% digital applications on September 23 to accomplish this.
By the year’s end, it aspires to digitize all citizenship applications, including those from minors under the age of 18.