Immigration NZ Refunds $44k in Fines Nobody Was Authorised to Issue

Immigration New Zealand is repaying $44,000 to more than twenty employers after discovering that the staff who issued the fines were not authorised to issue fines. The infringement notices were real, the payments were real, and the legal authority behind them was, on review, not.

The department describes this as a process issue, which it is, in the sense that the process was issuing fines and the issue was that this was not allowed. Employers who paid up promptly, as instructed by their Government, will now receive their money back from that same Government, this time with the paperwork in order.

There is no penalty for fining people without authority, though had an employer collected money it had no right to collect, they could of course expect a fine.