Immigration New Zealand has repaid about $44,000 to 21 companies after discovering that staff issued fines they did not have the legal authority to issue, RNZ reports.

The problem happened because acting managers approved the fines without having the proper permission to do so. INZ cancelled 23 fines in total, mostly from 2024. By the time the mistake was found, too much time had passed to reissue the fines, so the money is gone.

The mistake caused other problems too. INZ told 17 companies they had to stop recruiting migrant workers for 12 months, but the law only allows six months. All 21 companies were told about the error and removed from the public list. Eight companies also had their employer accreditation cancelled — INZ refunded their application fees to reapply.

Most of the companies affected were small. Of the 21, five were not even registered employers. The other 16 employed 55 migrant workers between them. The biggest fine allowed is $3,000 per company for things like hiring someone without a valid visa or operating without permission — and $1,000 for individuals. The $44,000 total suggests most companies were fined close to the maximum.

INZ told the government minister responsible about the errors. In the last financial year, INZ fined 118 employers altogether, so these wrongly-issued fines account for about one in five of all the enforcement actions INZ took that year.

When a company is on the stand-down list, they cannot hire new migrant workers — which is a serious problem for their business. Having 17 companies told they had to wait twice as long as they should, and having their names on a public list while that happened, can affect employment contracts and visa conditions for the workers involved.

To put this in perspective: even Uber is on the current INZ stand-down list, showing the agency enforces rules beyond just small employers.

These errors came down to a problem with how permissions were set up inside INZ. The mistake affects not just the fines themselves but also all the consequences that flow from them. INZ has not said publicly what it is doing to fix the problem, and it is not yet clear if the minister has asked for proof that permissions are now set up correctly across the whole agency.