This admonition, given to potential witnesses about their paramount obligation when giving evidence in court cases, applies with equal force to visa applicants.
It is absolutely essential that visa applicants be entirely truthful in the information and documents that they provide to the Department in connection with a visa application. This obligation is stated expressly in section 101(b) of the Migration Act, which provides that a non-citizen must complete his or her application form in such a way that no incorrect answers are given or provided. The consequence of providing incorrect information on a visa application may be that the visa may be cancelled under section 109 of the Act. And under section 48, a person whose visa has been cancelled may only be able to re-apply for adelete’a’ very limited types of visas.
As we see in Trivedi v Minister for Immigration and Border Protection [2014] FCAFC 42 (4 April 2014), the consequences of giving incorrect information on a visa application can be very dire indeed. This case concerned the cancellation of a Subclass 189 – Skilled – Independent visa due to false information having been provided on an application form. The AAT affirmed the Department’s decision.
To make matters worse, the visa holder had lodged an application for Australian citizenship after he had received notification from the Department that it considered that some of the information that he had provided on his visa application was not correct.
So, in this case, the submission of incorrect information caused “everything to become unraveled”: it resulted not only in the cancellation of the 189 visa, but it undoubtedly doomed any chance the visa holder might have had of getting his citizenship application approved.
On the visa application, it had been indicated that the visa holder had obtained a skills assessment from the relevant skills assessment authority for his nominated occupation of “accountant” and that he had also undertaken an IELTS test which resulted in the characterization of his English language proficiency as being “superior”.
However, following the grant of the visa, CPA Australia advised the Department that it had no record in its database of a skills assessment having been done for the applicant, no record of the reference number for the skills assessment that had been provided to the Department, and not even any record of the applicant’s name.
Similarly, checks that were undertaken by the Department with the IELTS Report Verification Service revealed that there was no record of the applicant’s having ever undertaken an IELTS test, no record of the reference number for the test that had been provided with the application, and no record of the applicant’s name in the IELTS database!