Canada to introduce advanced technology methods to curb visa fraud

The government of Canada is set to introduce advanced information technology methods to identify and reject fraudulent applications early in the process.

Ted Gallivan, deputy minister, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) said this during a House of Commons committee meeting this week.

According to him, this approach will be a deviation from the usual “soft touch” approach on suspected international student visa fraud or non-compliance.

Reports also highlighted that while the IRCC identified over 153,000 students potentially in breach of their permit conditions between 2023 and 2024, they only had the funding to investigate 2,000 cases annually. Also 40 percent of those cases were closed because students did not respond, making it nearly impossible to verify their compliance.

The new measures on adopting an advanced IT system to mitigate this, follows a critical report on the programme by Karen Hogan, auditor general of Canada.

The Digital Platform Modernization (DPM) system, which the department expects to fully implement by the end of this year, will provide better data to process legitimate claims quickly while flagging suspicious ones.

“We’ll learn what a diploma from a certain university is supposed to look like, and we’ll be able to detect if it’s been doctored,”Gallivan said.

He admitted to committee members that the IRCC had previously failed to follow up on thousands of confirmed and suspected fraud cases. This oversight meant the agency could not identify specific patterns or uncover organised fraud networks.

“Cases of suspected fraud that we didn’t follow up on to understand the methodology, the pattern, was intel that we couldn’t put into the analytics system,” he explained. “And so we definitely have missed that opportunity.”

However, Gallivan insisted the department is moving past these mistakes. “We take any case of identified fraud that we find and follow up on, and we unpack it, and then we put it in the front end, so that all new visas going forward are screened against that fact pattern. If we find somebody trying to do the same thing. We’re trying to stop the ‘fool me twices.’”

The committee met to discuss the Auditor General’s report, released on March 23.The report revealed that between 2018 and 2023, the IRCC failed to act on 800 study permits that involved false information or fraudulent documents.

Gallivan noted that the federal government offered no justification for why these cases were not pursued.

Ngozi Ekugo

Ngozi Ekugo is a Senior Correspondent at BusinessDay. She holds a Masters in management from the University of Lagos, an undergraduate from University of Lagos, and is in an alumni of Queen's College. Shes currently an associate member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management (CIPM). She has a brief experience at Goldman sachs, London in its Human Capital Management division. She is interested in human capital development and is leveraging her varied experience across sectors to report labour and global mobility trends for stakeholders to make informed decisions.