Mrinal Mehra, Rossana Reyes, Michelle Smith, Tina Hseih and Tahreem Zia from the International team.
After a huge team effort, the International team has received the tick of approval from Immigration New Zealand (INZ) for their work on student visa compliance.
The role of our Student Visa team is to process visas for new and returning international students. When students study here, they must give us copies of their visa and meet certain conditions associated with that visa.
Following an unexpected audit by INZ last year, we were given one semester to tidy up some of our processes. Reporting was a big focus, along with analysing enrolment data and managing visa errors quickly. Tahreem Zia – Visa and Insurance Analyst, Rossana Reyes – Visa Administrator and Michelle Smith – International Business Support Manager, coordinated the effort and kept in close contact with the compliance team at INZ throughout semester 1.
One requirement that INZ asked of the Student Visa team was to identify and declare any visa issue to INZ within 10 days of the issue occurring. IMS helped to set up an efficient reporting template for this.
Late in semester 1, INZ were back to complete another audit. The results were a huge turnaround, with Unitec now being assessed as low risk for visa issues.
Michelle Smith, International Business Support Manager, said “the results of the audit were outstanding. There were no issues found regarding our compliance with the Immigration Act. We now have a good relationship with INZ. We are looking at working with them to supply them with regular reporting whereby we are both cross checking our data to see if there are any issues.”
Congratulations to the International team for this excellent result!
Congratulations, Michelle and Team.
That was a big rain cloud blown away by a mighty gust of team spirit!
Cheers to all in International.
Mary
That is a great result, congratulations to the international office and the staff involved!
It shows that we can turn things around and gives hope for that other review later this year 🙂
Awesome work team! Congrats.
awesome work team and can we also thank the academic teams who also played a big contribution is linkage of information so we could manually report and achieve an amazing commendation.
Well done International!
Great work to all involved. Great to hear our stories of success and the hard work that goes in to making these massive improvements happen!
Great result for Unitec! This goes to show what cross department collaboration can achieve in an exceptionally short time frame.
More of this please!
Great teamwork and impressive results! Clear demonstration of what hard work and dedication can help achieve! Congratulations Team!
Great job under considerable pressure. Well done International team
Awesome team, it’s great to see hard work and teamwork and collaboration achieve great results