Immigration New Zealand ran a biometric technology upgrade for seven years, spent somewhere between $35 million and $40 million of public money, delivered nothing, and then kept the minister in the dark about how badly it had gone wrong. An independent review released last week found the project was doomed from the start. The real question is not why it failed. Government IT projects fail all the time. The question is why the people responsible were allowed to hide it.
Engineered to avoid oversight
The Biometric Capability Upgrade launched in November 2018 without ministerial sign-off. Its original business case projected $18.79 million in savings over five years, projections that were never supported by detailed analysis. The whole-of-life cost was revised upward four times in four years, from $19.5 million in 2019 to $35 million by 2023.
That $35 million figure matters because it is the exact Cabinet-mandated threshold above which ministerial approval is required. By April 2024, costs had reached $39.9 million, blowing past the threshold. But by August 2024, costs were mysteriously reported as back within the $35 million limit. No project documentation explains what changed.
What the review did find was that officials allegedly tried to slip a funding increase into an unrelated Cabinet paper. When questioned, they divided the funding so each component would sit below the threshold. A total of $4.44 million was transferred out of the project between 2022 and 2025, further muddying the numbers. Staff who raised concerns were moved off the project. Checks and balances existed on paper but were bypassed when red flags were raised.
This was not optimism bias. It was engineering.
Two months in a drawer
The independent review by Greg James was completed and delivered to MBIE. It then sat there for two months before being passed to Immigration Minister Erica Stanford. Stanford said she was “furious” and described the advice she had received as “complete fiction”. She said officials had sought more funding without declaring that previous requests had been declined.
Critically, Stanford noted this was not a problem unique to the current government. Officials had “deliberately withheld information” from the previous Labour government as well. Former Labour Immigration Minister Andrew Little confirmed to The Spinoff that the revelations were “consistent with the kind of relationship I had with immigration officials”. When both sides of the political aisle say the same ministry misled them, the problem is not political. It is institutional.
The numbers still do not add up
The 2026 Budget included a $31.2 million write-off, but that figure is almost certainly understated. Current estimates put BCU costs at approximately $35 million, with a related project costing a further $8.5 million. RNZ immigration reporter Gill Bonnett noted that the figures still do not reconcile and that “the integrity of the public service has been called into question over the way officials ducked and dived” to avoid telling ministers how badly things had gone.
MBIE Chief Executive Nic Blakeley acknowledged that “MBIE’s decisions, oversight and governance failings led to the project’s overall failure” but defended his staff’s integrity. Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche has appointed an independent investigator. Whether that investigation will determine deliberate deception, rather than just incompetence, remains the open question.
Now they want $336 million for the sequel
Here is the detail that should make every business owner pay attention. The same ministry is now seeking $336 million over seven years for a successor programme called Our Future Services. The business case, published in February 2025, projects $453 million in monetisable benefits and $80 million in annual net savings after delivery.
The BCU’s original business case also projected savings. They were fiction.
Immigration processing directly affects workforce planning for every employer in the country. The system that was supposed to modernise identity management, reduce fraud, and speed up visa processing has instead consumed seven years and tens of millions of dollars while leaving the underlying problem unsolved. Businesses absorb compliance costs, regulatory obligations, and reporting burdens with real consequences for getting things wrong. The public sector, apparently, can burn $35 million with zero deliverables and the worst that happens is someone commissions another review.
Until there are actual consequences for the people who engineered this evasion, the $336 million successor programme is not an investment. It is a bet placed on the same broken table.
Sources
- Immigration officials ‘deliberately withheld’ information on failed technology upgrade (2026-06-17)
- Immigration project wasted millions, finances remain unclear (2026-06-17)
- ‘Furious’ minister reveals officials misled her, knowingly avoided Cabinet over ‘doomed’ immigration project, millions wasted (2026-06-17)
- MBIE chief defends Immigration NZ staff integrity after minister claims officials misled her (2026-06-17)
- Creative accounting: How officials kept a failed tech upgrade under the radar (2026-06-18)
- Fury and threats over ministerial arse-covering at Immigration NZ (2026-06-18)