Ms X is a 23-year-old girl from China and she currently holds a student visa. She wants to apply for a Partner of a New Zealander Work Visa. Her school recently informed her that she will be dismissed from her program because of her low attendance rate and poor academic performance, which will invalidate her current New Zealand student visa.

She has lived with her New Zealander partner for three months and is pregnant with his child; however, their partnership evidence is not very sufficient to apply for a partnership-based work visa. They only have three letters sent to their joint living address, and their joint bank account has only been open for one month. Due to the bank staff’s negligence, their joint account only displays one person’s name; the bank noticed the mistake, but it was only corrected a few days ago.

We informed them that their partnership evidence is weak, and the most critical evidence of their partnership is Ms X’s pregnancy. Therefore, we suggested she apply for a three-month visitor visa before applying for a partnership-based work visa so that she can accumulate more partnership evidence. However, the client insisted on applying for a work visa rather than a visitor visa. In order to avoid future disputes, we asked her to sign a risk-informed letter before we lodged her visa application.

After the work visa was lodged, the applicant told us that she was considering terminating her pregnancy and asked us for our advice. We told her that it would affect the outcome of her application and sent her the following email after this meeting:

‘Dear Ms X,

As per our conversation, we find that the evidence of your partnership is weak, and the most important proof of your partnership is your pregnancy.

We would like to kindly notify you that if Immigration New Zealand finds out that you plan to terminate your pregnancy, your partnership-based application will be at risk. Hence, we suggest that you fully consider your decision regarding your pregnancy before acting, as it will affect the outcome of your application.

Please try to prepare other partnership evidence as much as you can. The evidence and documents you can prepare include (but are not limited to) the following:

□ Joint mortgage/loan documents

□ Joint insurance policies

□ Joint assets/liabilities

□ Bank statements, utility bills or other mail received at your home address. The document must state you or your partner’s name, your home address and a date. If it is addressed to you and your partner separately, you and your partner need to provide at least one document each that you received at the same address with similar dates.

□ Travel itineraries or tickets for trips you have taken together

After preparing this additional evidence, please send the original copies of these documents to our company as soon as possible.

Kind regards,

Mutual Benefit Limited’

One month later, we received a letter from her case officer and informed our client that the content of this letter was similar to the one we had sent in our risk-informed letter.

Partnership concerns

Living together

You claim that you moved in together as of 02 March 2018; you have provided limited evidence to support this claim. Your tenancy agreement is insufficient to support the duration of living together that you have claimed. The tenancy agreements you provided seem to be written by the same hand and using the same pen. The signature on the tenancy agreement and the support letter from the landlord do not match up.

Genuine partnership

Your original purpose in coming to New Zealand was to study. You have not provided any information to show that you have other pathways to remain in New Zealand. You have not provided sufficient evidence to demonstrate that you have genuine intentions to enter into this relationship on a long term basis.

You appear have met your partner only weeks before moving in together. Given the limited timeframe and opportunities to spend time with your partner; we are not satisfied your claimed relationship is credible.

You have provided insufficient evidence to show that you and your partner have a ‘Shared Life’ together as a couple or evidence to show that the degree of commitment of each other to a shared life on a long term basis.

You have not provided evidence of you both being committed to each other both emotionally and exclusively.

You and your partner have a joint bank account. You state that the bank made an error and forgot to add your name to the joint account. You have provided no evidence of this from the bank. We note that this account has not been used to pay utilities, rent or so forth which adds a concern regarding the credibility of this account.

You provided evidence of a joint insurance policy update at your joint address. This is insufficient to cover the duration of living together as claimed.

Stable partnership

You have not provided sufficient evidence to demonstrate that your partnership is likely to endure.

The evidence of living together you have provided only covers the duration from March 2018 to June 2018. We do not consider your period of living together is long enough to demonstrate that your claimed relationship is stable.

As the issues detailed above may affect the outcome of your application, we are bringing them to your attention out of fairness to you.

We have not made a decision on your application at this stage. This letter gives you the opportunity to make any comments and submit any additional evidence or information in relation to these issues.

The client’s response and emotions were relatively stable after hearing the news; however, she decided to find a new lawyer to respond to this PPI letter from INZ and asked us to issue her a refund because she claimed that we did not mention the refund policy in the risk-informed letter. We explained the clause about ‘termination of service’ to the client before she signed the written agreement with us, but in order to avoid future disputes, we refunded the client and terminated her contract with us. One month later, she posted on Moments (similar to Twitter) that her visa application had been declined.

Upon reflection, we have learned that if there is any risk when applying for a visa, or if the application is futile, we must ensure that we have obtained the client’s written permission to lodge the application and make sure that he or she knows the associated risks and consequences. There should also be a clause regarding the refund policy of a futile case stating that if the client insists on applying for a visa, the first service fee is not refundable. We failed to explicitly mention the refund policy in this case, and we did not consider that she might seek new representation, which caused a lot of work on our part without a financial payoff.

We usually charge the client at two stages: 1) after we submit the application, and 2) when a successful decision has been made, including an approved-in-principle decision. However, if the client chooses to seek new representation, we do not receive the service fee for the second stage. Therefore, we should add a clause in our agreement that if the client chooses to seek new representation, he or she will pay 50% of the second-stage service fee.