Following the publication of the Thom Review, the department also set up a task force to monitor. Figure 1 - The investigation of the Ombudsperson for the implementation by the Department of Internal Affairs of the recommendations of the Thom Review.
The Immigration Detention Process
T RAINING
The Thom Review found that department staff involved in Mr A's and Mr B's affairs had gaps in their knowledge of obtaining Australian citizenship and "lacked the basic level of knowledge necessary to perform their duties '. Review deemed these knowledge gaps to be a “systemic issue posing significant risk to DIBP and its clients”6 and recommended that the department “improve immigration status resolution training” and so on. The department advised that there should also be requirements for further training in this system and the Learning.
S YSTEMS , T OOLS AND P ROCEDURES Tools and Checklists
The department reported that since the release of the Citizenship Tool, the DRM has begun using the Citizenship Tool as a standard part of any detention assessment. However, the accurate identification of Australian citizens through the Citizenship Tool is highly dependent on the accuracy of the. In our view, Mr C's case clearly demonstrates that the citizenship questions in the MCP are not sufficient to identify all Australian citizens eligible for mandatory cancellation under Section 501(3A) of the Act.
The NCCC stated that it did encourage officials to use the free text fields in the MCP. This is not evident from the MCP itself or any of the NCCC's supporting process documents.
Systems and records management
In our view, there are some elements of the Located Person Interview form that are so important that an officer should not be able to decide to skip them, and this should be made clear to officers. 3.58. The ABF National Compliance Program has advised that officers are not expected to ask the traced person every question in the Citizenship Tool as it is written, but that the person should ask the questions they need to be satisfied with the answers as they through the checklist. Although we understand that this was communicated to officers during the briefings delivered with the national launch of the Localized Person Interview, this is not clear from the current version of the Localized Person Interview form and associated standard operating procedure. 3.61.
A 2018 review by the ANAO found that 'the department's record-keeping remains weak'24 and recommended that 'the Department of Home Affairs prioritizes addressing its records and information management deficiencies, including through the implementation of the Action Plan for Records and Information Management The audit found that the department had critical problems with the amount of information not in or accessible through its IT systems, to the extent of 200 million documents stored in network drives, 238 million documents in TRIM and 241 shelf kilometers of paper-based files. While we recognize that areas such as the Immigration Status Service are doing the best they can with the information at their disposal, we note the findings of the recently published ANAO report which highlight the wider problem the department faces in terms of inaccessibility of large amounts of information that are not stored in its electronic databases.
Processes and Procedures
P ERSONAL R ESPONSIBILITY AND R EASONABLE
S USPICION
Personal responsibility
The business areas we dealt with across the department all advised that they had taken steps to remind staff of the importance of exercising personal responsibility and judgment since the arrests of Mr B and Mr. A. While doing fieldwork across the department, we found different levels of awareness and involvement in the lessons of Mr A and Mr. B, and a range of attitudes about how officers viewed their roles and responsibilities. In contrast, the ABF officers we interacted with had little knowledge about the cases of Mr A and Mr B, or the ABF's role in detaining these citizens.
The ABF pointed to a July 2017 weekly team briefing as the main piece of national communication with officers following Mr. A and Mr. B. We note that while this document reminds officers of the importance of considering whether a person may be an Australian citizen, it does not mention any cases or recommendations arising from the Thom Review.
Reasonable suspicion
We suggested to the department that conceptualizing the DRM's role as "controlling" reasonable suspicion rather than "holding" reasonable suspicion reduces the DRM's sense of personal responsibility for the continued detention of the person in every case they review. Similarly, we believe it is reasonable that the Status Resolution Officer, who is responsible for reviewing an individual's case each month they are in immigration detention, is responsible for forming and maintaining a reasonable suspicion that the individual is an unlawful non citizen. during that time. We believe that for the Department to have confidence that any person held in Immigration Detention is lawfully detained as an unlawful non-citizen, the DRM and the assigned Status Resolution Officer must form and nurture reasonable suspicion in their own minds for each case they handle.
To do otherwise reduces the officer's personal responsibility to ensure the lawfulness of the person's continued detention in each case. The DRM and Status Resolution Officer should be required to establish and maintain a reasonable suspicion that the person in any case they review/manage is an illegal noncitizen.
Processes that support taking personal responsibility
In the status resolution space, we observed Status Resolution Officers for the most part, exercising personal responsibility and judgment by conducting a thorough examination of available information before completing the custody client interview, assessment tools of community placement and case reviews. We also noted that the expected role of Australian Public Service (APS) level 4 officers is characterized as more administrative than APS5 level officers, and that therefore some APS4 level officers saw their role as primarily administrative and had less a personal feeling. responsibility for identifying issues than APS5 and APS6 status resolution officers. In response to these concerns, the ABF advised that its 'Management of Non-Citizens in Criminal Custody' working group is currently working on clarifying and streamlining the transition points between officers dealing with pre-release prisoners as part of its work to developed national standards. processes in this space.
Taking responsibility for updating systems
Q UALITY C ONTROL AND Q UALITY A SSURANCE
In March 2017, the department adopted an assurance model that contains three distinct but interconnected lines of assurance. 1st line: Management assurance—managers across the department own and manage risk in their business area. 2nd line: Risk review and compliance functions—ensuring that the first line of assurance is properly designed, in place, and operating as intended.
3rd Line: Independent Assurance—from independent assurance functions within the department including internal audit and stop assurance sections to provide assurance on the effectiveness of risk management and internal controls. The Thom Review assessed that the assurance policy document was "at a high level and, without further details, it is not possible to say whether the implementation of this model will address the systemic quality assurance problems identified in this report". recommend that 'as a matter of urgency, DIBP should ensure that its assurance processes address the systemic deficiencies identified in this report...'37.
Quality control checks at decision points
We suggest that the department has the best opportunity to identify these types of issues in the Detention Client Interview Part A and the Community Placement Assessment Tool. The Detention Client Interview Part A is important because it is the department's first opportunity in the status resolution continuum to obtain assurance that the detainee is an illegal non-citizen. In addition, we recommend that the department conduct a formal quality check on the initial Community Placement Assessment Tool that is conducted after an individual is placed in Immigration Detention.
In the July-December 2017 period, Mr G's period of inadequate detention (1,375 days) was by far the longest and DRM was unable to identify this as the Service was unaware of the notification error at the time of the initial detention review. This would support the department's assurance model by enabling second line controls to ensure that quality assurance checks in the first line of assurance are adequate at the decision point.
Quality assurance and reporting
The department said it intends to implement a robust quality assurance process for the DRM. The recommendations of the Thom Review emphasized the importance of developing a culture of continuous improvement in the department, with Recommendation 4 stating that the. Yet we also note that the size of this group is not declining, and indeed, in the department's most recent report to our agency, the number of people released as 'not wrongful' had increased.
In implementing these recommendations, we suggest that the department should also try to leverage the role of the DRM and its line of sight across a range of business areas. The department should try to formalize a process whereby the DRM team provides ongoing feedback to the ABF and possibly other business units.
Recommendation tracking
The department stated that its audit committee is its primary mechanism for centralized oversight across this range of recommendations in internal and external evaluations. The audit committee consists of five members, three of whom are external to the department. These changes represent positive progress in ensuring that the implementation of recommendations is tracked and regularly considered by the department's senior management.
The department announced that it was working to identify recommendations that had not yet been made. Currently, the majority of the department's recommendations are tracked in spreadsheets that are manually updated by the area responsible for monitoring implementation progress.
G LOSSARY
SECRETARY
- Accepted
- Accepted
- Accepted
- Accepted
- Accepted
- Accepted
- Accepted Recommendation 9: Accepted
- Accepted
- Accepted in part, noting comments in relation to Part a)
Turning to the specific recommendations in your report, the Department accepts 14 of the 15 recommendations and partially accepts recommendation 11(a). The tools that the Department and ABF currently use to identify and resolve citizenship issues are the Detention Client Interview Part A (Department) and the Placed Persons Interview (ABF). The Department accepts the remaining parts of recommendation 11 including parts (c) and (e) which recommend quality assurance and quality controls in relation to the Custody Client Interview, Part A and the Placed Person Interview respectively.
The Ministry notes that parts c) and e) of this recommendation address quality control related to the interview with a client in custody, Part A and the interview with a located person. As part of this work, the department recently reviewed reports submitted to the Ombudsman over a two-year period.
