Biometric Project's $6 Million Surprise Arrives With No Guarantee It's the Last One

The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s seven-year Biometric Capability Upgrade project was cancelled in December 2025, at which point roughly $33 million was written off. Immigration Minister Erica Stanford has now announced a further $6 million in costs, discovered after the fact, in the way loose change turns up once a couch has been thoroughly overturned. The department’s own chief executive, asked whether this is the final figure, declined to say so.

That reluctance follows a review by Greg James, which raised the possibility MBIE structured its reporting to keep the project under $35 million, the threshold above which Cabinet gets to have an opinion. The project spent years staying just quiet enough to avoid a conversation it apparently could not have survived, then had the conversation anyway, months after being cancelled.

Stanford has ordered an independent financial audit and asked that the Michael Heron inquiry already examining the project be widened to cover it properly. The Public Service Commissioner has also been notified. Somewhere in MBIE there is a true and final number for what the BCU cost taxpayers. Nobody currently employed there is prepared to confirm they have found it.