2017-Apr 21: United States of America Police Certificates issued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation or an Approved Channeler

Visa Pak 306: Advice for staff about details that are included on an FBI certificate by local authorities and finding out what this information means.

Visa Paks

21 April 2017

United States of America Police Certificates issued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation or an Approved Channeler

The Immigration New Zealand (INZ) website currently instructs applicants who require a police certificate from the United States of America (USA) to obtain this through either the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) or an approved channeler.

When a person applies for a police certificate from the USA, the FBI seeks criminal information on the applicant from the local authority’s database. For people who have convictions in certain states, the local authority in a particular state may send through details of the conviction to the FBI as an acronym. In turn, this acronym will be printed on the applicant’s police certificate.

Because there is no generic federal coding system for convictions across the USA, the FBI may not know what the charge actually was or the outcome of the conviction based on the information they have received. As a result, some police certificates are issued with only an acronym to reflect a conviction and it is not clear whether the applicant was fined, imprisoned, etc. This means that when an Immigration Officer is assessing whether an applicant meets character instructions, they may not be able to correctly determine the nature of the conviction and outcome to conclude if the applicant requires a character waiver or falls under s15 or s16 of the Immigration Act 2009.

Staff processing visa applications should therefore request court documentation and/or a state-issued police certificate which discloses the conviction and outcome in full if the applicant has been convicted of an offence in the USA, and their police certificate is affected by either of the below:

  • an acronym has been used and no plain-English description of the conviction is recorded; or
  • the full sentence received, including details of any imprisonment or non-custodial sentences is not recorded.

The information on obtaining police certificates from the USA published on the INZ website has also been updated to reflect this under the ‘Further Information’ section.