Hi AndSoToCanada, please allow me to respond to your theories one by one.
- Those few people whose CC's already got charged or BN's withdrawn are hands-down highly qualified that the officers never thought twice of accepting. Question is - how did CIC manage to thoroughly background check those people?
My understanding is that the opening of applications and completeness check is not done by qualified immigration officers but by administrative clerks. I suspect the very reason they do a seperate completeness check prior to the eligibility review is that they do not waste immigration officers' time with incomplete applications.
So those who have had their cards charged IMO were not hand picked and certainly did not have a thorough background check. At the completeness check they will check the following
1) All forms are present
2) All forms are signed where there is space for a signature, and no missing fields
3) All supporting documentation as specified in the CIO checklist and visa-office specific checklist has been incldued
4) That they correct payment draft or credit card authorisation has been included
As you might guess it does not take a fully qualified immigration officer to check these things, and it is cheaper for CIC to pay clerks to do this than immigration officers.
- Just because you submitted your papers early doesn't necessarily mean you're in. If you're score is borderline 67, the officers may put yours aside temporarily and process more applications in order to accommodate more qualified and deserving people. Just like when hiring employees they wait a little bit to get a better candidate. So my theory is that they have some kind of a temporary waitlist.
They will not discriminate and put applications to the side for more "deserving" people. At this stage they make no decision as to the application's eligibility, only its completeness. And I am 99.999% certain they have no temporary waiting list.
However, almost certainly the clerks performing the completeness check will not be the ones actually processing the fees payments. I imagine this will be a seperate accounting team, so when the completeness check is done I am guessing they send the payment for off to the accounts team and the rest of the file to the immigration officers ready for the eligibility review. So the rate at which payments are cashed does not necessarily reflect the rate at which completeness checks are performed, hence why the number of members reporting their payments taken does not seem to tally with our percentage of the total applications on the CIC website.
- "Complete Applications Received" should be taken as "complete appications received", literally. I think there is a separate group that does completeness check and another one that does in-depth assessment. So complete applications still have to go through background checking, verification, etc. If the initial 500 didn't pass the thorough assessment, CIC will tap on their reserve (ranked by submission date and score).
Feel free to criticize this theory. Thanks.
You are right about one group doing the completeness check and the other group doing the eligibility review. Remember that the eligibility review must be done by a full immigration officer, whereas the completeness check can be done by someone less experienced/qualified.
However I believe you're incorrect about the "reserve". The first 500 applications for any given NOC to pass the completeness check will be considered for processing. If any of those applications are rejected at any further stage (CIO eligibility review, visa office eligibility review, visa office background checks, medicals, security checks etc) then they will not take another application instead.
So whereas 10,000 applications will be considered for processing - in reality the number of actual applications approved will be somewhat less.
Wayne.
Immigration Forum
