Open hours: 10 am to 5 pm
| Deferral of EOI selections for the Skilled Migrant Category and Parent Category |
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| The Government first deferred EOI selections for the Skilled Migrant Category and Parent Category in April 2020. The Government will continue to defer the Expression of Interest selection process for the Skilled Migrant Category and Parent Resident Category for a further 6 months. This decision will be reviewed in 2021. All those who have previously submitted expressions of interest in these categories will be notified of the continued deferral. The continued deferral of these Expressions of Interest selections allows INZ to focus on processing applications from people who are in New Zealand or those eligible to travel here while border restrictions are in place. |
| Verifying identity with voice biometrics |
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| Clients calling INZ’s Contact Centre will be able to enrol for a service to automatically verify their identity from mid-October. Those who enrol for the service will be asked to key in their AMS (application management system) number, a unique identifier, then say their date of birth three times. A digital voice print will be generated, stored and linked to their client number. On their next call the client will key in their INZ client number then state their date of birth. Voice prints are compared to confirm the identity of the client for the agent answering the call. The agent can still manually verify the caller's identity should the comparison fail to automatically authenticate. The authentication process will be quicker and improve security for clients by significantly reducing the risk of a privacy breach. This measure does not affect dedicated Licensed Immigration Advisers/lawyer service numbers as these channels already use a faster verification process. |
