Raman_Ram said:
My question was to gauge whether CIC is still indiscriminately issuing RQs like for 50% of the applications like they used to do for applications sent prior to July 2014.
The issuance of RQ was never near 50%, not even at the peak of the initial OB 407 rollout in 2012.
While it is difficult to discern accurate statistics about the rate of RQ, recognizing that 2012 was undoubtedly the year during which the highest rate of RQ was issued, best estimates suggest a rate of less than 25% overall for that year even.
In 2013 the rate appears to have dropped below 15%.
But the main thing is that RQ is issued based on actual criteria, not indiscriminately. The percentages have little impact on whether any given individual will be issued RQ. If the individual's circumstances trigger one of the fixed criteria, RQ will be issued. If the individual's circumstances are a factor considered subject to context and other circumstances, the risk of RQ is elevated but the actual risk itself is still tied to the actual circumstances in the applicant's case.
This is not to deny that in 2012 CIC was not employing overly broad criteria. They obviously were. Thus sweeping into the RQ net a huge number of applicants for whom there really was no reason to question the applicant's residency. This is not to deny that even still, some of the criteria employed by CIC is probably broad enough to continue sweeping many into the RQ net for whom, likewise, there is little or no reason to question their residency.
We have quite a bit of historical information about what criteria was employed in decisions to issue RQ, including the "reasons to question residency" initially rolled out in an Operational Bulletin in 2005 and employed (subject to variations in more targeted factors) until the rollout of OB 407 in 2012, and the formal triage criteria that was in the initial OB 407 version of the File Requirements Checklist. Unfortunately, however, beyond some less than direct information about clarifications and modifications to the criteria. we can only extrapolate and speculate about what the criteria is now. Probably largely the same, but how it is applied is a big unknown. (Example: period of unemployment probably still a factor, but not a definite trigger, and we do not know what other factors tip this toward RQ or away.)