Click here to print
Senate Probe Reveals: Few Controls At Immigration Department
Wed, January 18, 2017

Last week in the Senate Inquiry, Former Director Maria Marin was the one being interrogated by the Senate Committee about the mass irregularities detailed in the Auditor General’s Report. Today, her predecessor, Former Immigration Director Ruth Meighan, was the one in the hotseat, and like everyone who’s appeared so far, she wasn’t given any sort of bly. 

As we told you last week, the majority of the audit period which Dorothy Bradley and her team reviewed was under Meighan’s tenure, and it was also during that time that those highly suspect immigration documents were being issued en masse. Meighan had to endure about 4 hours of intense grilling, and there’s so much that we can’t share all of it with you in tonight’s newscast. But, right now, we pick up the conversation between Meighan and the Senators about the absence of checks and balances which aided the fraud and forgery on applications for visas, passports, and nationality certificates. Here’s that back and forth between Meighan and the Senators:

Hon. Dr. Carla Barnett - UDP Senator
"In terms of your oversight, because you're not the person who's approving the passports - "

Ruth Meighan - Former Director of Immigration
"No."

Hon. Dr. Carla Barnett
"But there has to be, within the department, some managerial oversight that would have information coming to you that you would be able to see what your senior officers were approving."

Ruth Meighan
"Other than the monthly meetings, just to give like brief reporting, there wasn't much information on the processing of passport or - just reports to say, 'Well, we have issued so much passports for the month, or that sort of information."

Hon. Aldo Salazar - Chairman, Senate Select Committee
"I would gather that there was little or no process to audit... the issuance of visas, say, or passports, or nationality... by the Department itself."

Ruth Meighan
"No, not while I was there."

Hon. Dr. Carla Barnett
"No internal processes of any kind?"

Ruth Meighan
"None at all."

Hon. Aldo Salazar
"No review of - let's say you take randomly, say you take November 2016, and you look at visas that are approved to see if your officers were meeting the requirements - were approving in accordance with the requirements of the law and the policy."

Ruth Meighan
"No, internal checks that were done for those visas, as far as I could recall."

Close this window