At Down Under Visa we take mistakes in documents very seriously. We have to! Our job is to manage your Australian visa application, and to see you get a visa grant and be on your way to Australia. Mistakes in documents can lead to serious delays, or worse! If the Case Officer in the Australian Embassy in Manila considers you have made false statements or submitted bogus documents (fake documents) then your visa application may be refused! You may also face a 3 year ban, or even a 10 year ban if they cannot establish your identity.
For this reason we have staff members who do nothing but scrutinise your documents for errors and inconsistencies.
Sometimes we have clients with multiple mistakes. Wrong dates. Wrong spellings of names. Wrong places of birth. Or incorrect factual information. Sometimes every document they give us has several mistakes on it. Some of these are simple to fix, but others can take many months to fix properly. And when I say “properly”, I mean NOT to get the “fixer” to do a dodgy repair-job on your documents which will only make matters worse!
How do our clients react to bad news about their documents?
Everyone is disappointed, of course. You think that this will be a walk in the park, and suddenly you’re faced with the bad news that you have documents full of mistakes, and you hear that this will set you back for months! No one is ever happy to hear this, obviously.
Some handle it very well, and get on with the task of sorting it out. Others? Not so well. Some lash out, and we end up being the recipients of their frustration. And whilst you could almost say we are used to it, it wears us down emotionally some days. We didn’t cause the mistakes, and we’re just trying to do our job. If these applications went through without these things being identified then the end result would be much worse than having to fix the mistakes before the application is lodged, let me assure you!
Most, happy to say, will get on with the task of repairing the damage, and most will do it the proper way. No fun for you and no fun for us, but that’s the way it is.
What’s the worst thing you can do?
Getting a “fixer” is definitely the worst thing you can do. You WILL get caught!
And then we get the occasional client who thinks they can bypass the problem, and they go off and lodge the application themselves inside Australia instead of here in the Philippines. They think that it’s either Down Under Visa and Jeff Harvie who are picking on them, or maybe Manila Embassy is excessively tough. And in some cases they find another Migration Agent who lacks experience with Philippines applications who tells them that it will be OK as it is, and that they can lodge it for them with no issues at all.
Not a wise move! The Migration Regulations and Regulation 4020 (aka PIC 4020 or Public Interest Criteria 4020) apply regardless of where the application is lodged. The overseas posts have the experience with the local scenes in their particular countries, and if the Case Officer in the Australian DIBP (Department of Immigration and Border Protection) will refer to his Manila counterparts if clarification is needed. So it will catch up with you!
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Steve and Beth – Australian Filipina couple discuss Down Under Visa
Well said and to your readers, correct. We like other applicants were scrutinised by Jeff and his ever efficient team, (too efficient at times we thought, haha, we see the reasons for that now) many mistakes were picked up and corrected by Jeff, some were our stuff ups, some bureaucratic and some oversights. This is a long and frustrating process but one we had to endure to be together,
We first contacted Jeff in early July 2013 and went through 3 months of paper work for all the reasons pointed out by Jeff above, submitted partnership and tourist visa, within 2 weeks we had tourist visa and processing of partnership visa underway, about 11 months later we got the partnership visa through. (well done to the Downunder team)
We had our frustrations as Jeff knows, some times he and his team were the meat in the sandwich and bore the brunt of our frustrations and concerns, sorry guys.
At the end of the day they delivered, that’s why we consulted them, a bloody minefield to get through yourself. I, out of interest counted our emails,,,,,,,back and forward, 180, wow, questions asked and questions answered. Jeff has made us realise that accuracy is the key, ie, CFO, I told my better half to take every thing, all our doc’s. He did, 25 sat the course and only 6 got their sticker to leave the Philippines. The other 19 didn’t bring all their documents.
BTW, you have to book to do your CFO in Manila, we found out the hard way, scrutinise their site properly, pay no attention to “First come first serve” unless your partner living in a foreign country is a Filipino, read and beware.
To Jeff, Mila, Jeremy and the rest of your team, a big than kyou, we got there.
Hugs from Steve and Bengie