16 February 2023
45 Pipitea Street, Wellington 6011
Phone +64 4 495 7200
dia.govt.nz
Ed Hirsche via FYI
fyi-request-21330-
[email address]
Tēnā koe Ed
OIA request 22/23 0537 Request for Citizenship Data
Thank you for your Official Information Act (Act) request received by the Department of Internal
Affairs (Department) on 21 January 2023.
You requested –
•
In your correspondence with me, you refer to the 'mix' of applications received each
month, with some applications being quick, some of them being not so quick. I assume
you have some scheme to categorise or triage incoming applications into their levels of
difficulty and/or effort required.
•
Please provide me a breakdown of the number of applications received *by each
category* for each month you previously provided. If the names of the categories might
not be obvious to an outsider, please also provide a common-sense description of each
category.
It may be useful for you to know that our online system allows us to make automated checks to
see if an applicant meets certain requirements for citizenship. This system for processing
applications enables a series of automated checks to be run across all applications to triage
them into separate queues (referred to as buckets) based on the amount of manual
intervention required.
This means that some applications are processed faster than others, because a case officer does
not need to carry out as many manual checks. Applications that require extra manual checks
may take longer.
Please see Appendix A, Table One: Total number of applications processed by bucket broken
down into categorised buckets One to Five from January 2022 to November 2022.
For more information on the workstreams/ ‘Buckets’ please refer to our website
https://www.dia.govt.nz/Official-Information-Act-Requests-2 and the reference number 2223-
0324
As this information may be of interest to other members of the public, the Department has
decided to proactively release a copy of this response on the DIA website. All requestor data,
including your name and contact details, will be removed prior to release. The released
response will be made available here:
https://www.dia.govt.nz/Official-Information-Act-
Requests-2.
You have the right to seek an investigation and review by the Ombudsman of this decision.
Information about how to make a complaint is available at www.ombudsman.parliament.nz or
freephone 0800 802 602.
Ngā mihi
Julia Taylor
Manager Operational Policy and Official Correspondence
Service Delivery and Operations
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