ARE IMMIGRATION AUTHORITIES INCOMPETENT?

This is the type of incompetence that makes immigration lawyers crazy! See this Toronto Star story.

Toronto man accidentally mailed box of immigration applications - thestar.com

Toronto man accidentally mailed box of immigration applications
March 17, 2011

Amy Dempsey

A Toronto man says he was the accidental recipient of a box full of protected immigration applications packed with personal information belonging to eight people from Cuba and their Canadian sponsors.

Bruce Messner’s jaw dropped when he sliced open the big brown box that arrived at his home in North York on Wednesday.

“I was completely flabbergasted,” Messner said. “There is so much private information in there that can be misused.”

Messner, who is sponsoring his Cuban partner to come to Canada, discovered his own application package at the top. Underneath were eight other folders thick with photos, medical records, copies of birth certificates, credit card statements and other personal information.

Right away, Messner said he called the Citizenship and Immigration Canada call centre. He figured someone would be sent over immediately to collect the documents. But the CIC employee he spoke with “didn’t seem to be concerned at all,” Messner said.

The agent asked him if he wouldn’t mind mailing the box back to the CIC processing centre in Mississauga or dropping it off at the nearest immigration office.

“I figured somebody would do something,” said Messner. “If you give something to the government you would hope they would safeguard your info and get it to where it’s supposed to go.”

And so the box sat in his dining room until Thursday afternoon, when officials picked it up after the Star called to inquire about the mistake.

“CIC takes such breaches of privacy seriously and has already taken action by reporting this to our corporate security officials and will further investigate with the courier company why this incident occurred,” CIC spokeswoman Kelli Fraser said on Thursday.

CIC also said it will review its call centre operations to ensure calls about personal information are brought to the immediate attention of supervisors.

Messner said he mailed his sponsorship package to the CIC processing centre in Mississauga in early February. Then last Friday he got a call from a man who identified himself as an employee of the courier company TNT Express.

Messner said the man told him he had been trying to deliver a package to a Montreal address, but the person or people at the address refused to sign for it.

“There was an attempted delivery over here in Montreal at a government institution where it was not accepted,” said Nelson Da Silva, the TNT courier who was to deliver the box.

Da Silva said he couldn’t send it back to where it came from because there was no origin address on the package. Hoping to do a good deed, he then opened the box and called the first number he found in the documents at the top.

TNT spokeswoman Dina Ghram said it was actually the people at the Montreal address who opened the package and called TNT back when they realized they weren’t the proper recipients.

It is against TNT policy for employees to open packages. Ghram said TNT continues to investigate the incident.

Messner, who thought the box only contained his own sponsorship package, told Da Silva to send it back to him.

CIC officials told Messner they would expedite his application package to make up for the delay in processing.

“This sounds like a huge mistake, not a little one,” said Toronto immigration lawyer Lorne Waldman.

“I would hope the government does a fulsome investigation to find out how this happened so it doesn’t happen again.”