The ongoing rent for an immigration office closed more than a year ago has cost taxpayers almost $3 million.
Immigration New Zealand's Beijing office was shut in August 2021, following the closures of sites in India, South Africa and the Philippines.
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment's annual report shows it could not get out of its lease in China and will only be free of it next month.
The rent has cost $2.89m since it closed.
Last year, the government wrote off $284m of losses sustained by Immigration New Zealand (INZ), and has put visa levies up by 279 percent.
Another funding review is expected to deal with a further predicted deficit of $135m by the end of next year.
Other expenses last year included $57m on its new ADEPT online system, which has been plagued with problems.
In an Official Information Act request, INZ says there had been no public consultation on the ADEPT platform, although it followed the appropriate government procurement process.
2 comments
Sounds like
Posted on 06-01-2023 14:06 | By Kancho
Bureaucratic mismanagement. Labour has grown bureaucracy by thousands of people. Does this mean more efficiency well no the reverse. Housing, health, roading, family and child welfare, the list goes on . Add even more for three waters and it proves that we can have no faith in this governments so called reforms. Add inflation from printing and spending money, huge debt and sixty percent increase job seeker benefits
Clarification jobseeker benefits.
Posted on 06-01-2023 17:11 | By Kancho
The number of work-ready people on jobseeker support to the end of June was 100,086, about 60 percent higher than the 63,030 when Labour took office in 2017. So why are there so many supposed work ready people and so many vacancies . We are trying to attract skilled people who seem to find many other places to go and are joined by our skilled people leavin NZ too. So a write off by this department of the immigration dept as reported
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