Thanks
@dpenabill
Perhaps the ‘drawing board’ was a wrong choice of words; what I meant was restarting a background check / prohibitions which could perhaps explain the oath delay, which you have answered.
It’s been 40 months since I mailed my citizenship application; frustrating because I’m fairly certain that I’m not one of those who know what they know
Frustrating again because in Feb 2020, they updated everything about my case yet took another 24 months to validate my physical presence.
Frustrating because my MP chose to ignore my mails requesting help.
Frustrating because I haven’t visited my family in six years.
And I thought Indian bureaucracy was bad!
I understand the frustration, and I sympathize. IRCC really should be able to do a better job timely processing applications, even non-routine applications with substantive issues. It is disappointing.
Of course Covid has made a real mess of processing timelines. It is very likely the impact is worse for applications subject to substantive non-routine processing, and as this forum has amply criticized, the impact on even routinely processed applications has been unacceptably huge.
Overall, it appears your application was non-routine for substantive reasons, probably related to background inquiries related to verification of actual physical presence. Very hard to figure what is going on behind the curtains, but best guess is that questions about physical presence were the main reason things got held up; if these have been resolved, odds are good (never know for sure) you are on track for a more routine timeline going forward, to be scheduled for the oath. BUT, of course even the routine timelines are unpredictable still, and can range from long to longer.
This leads to distinguishing background "clearances," the formal RCMP and CSIS clearances, versus IRCC's "background" screening of citizenship applicants generally. Apart from the formal clearances from the RCMP or CSIS, there are many questions or concerns IRCC might have regarding a particular applicant's qualifications. Physical presence is among the more common issues. If IRCC has concerns, it can and it appears quite often it does refer the applicant to CBSA to conduct an investigation into the applicant's background, which in turn is referred to the NSSD (an investigatory division within CBSA). This will NOT show up in the Tracker, let alone eCas, and will not be seen by a call centre agent looking at the file, and there is no notation (that I know of) for this in the VERSION of GCMS records an applicant can obtain through an ATIP request. Investigatory procedures are confidential, not disclosed to clients; and typically not even the fact that there is an investigatory process taking place.
Again, no way to be sure, but given the overall timeline, request for travel history (as I recall you got that during the interview), differences between your application and your spouse's, and now the indication about physical presence, it looks like that could be what happened, a referral to CBSA to verify information related to your physical presence -- which can cause a significant delay in the best of times, but has undoubtedly been much worse during covid, and on top of that, it appears the timing of such a referral was especially bad for you, referral actions on files in early 2020 seem to be the most delayed by covid.
In any event, the *clue* and it is just a clue is the notation about physical presence being complete. Since that just happened, that is a clue that has been what was holding up your application. Cannot say for sure. But it is better than a guess, this is the likely suspect.
I cannot guess why there was a particular concern about your physical presence (assuming that was the concern delaying processing). The documents you were asked for were well within commonly experienced non-routine processing, a kind of non-routine processing I'd describe as incidental, and since there was no follow-up asking for more, and you did not get "RQ" as such, not even RQ lite (as best I recall from some of your posts and questions you posed to me a couple years or so ago), at that time that did not indicate a substantive concern.
So in terms of whether you are among those who know or should know what is holding things up, it appears you fall into a grey area . . . you knew there was some question about your physical presence, given the request for supplemental evidence, but since no formal RQ came later, and you have high confidence in the information you submitted, easy to see why you would not think questions about physical presence was the hold up.
From the way these things went in the past, I would have expected some version of RQ if IRCC still had physical presence concerns.
Hard to extrapolate much beyond that, since Covid has made such a mess of things and in addition to the overall impact of delaying everything, some things more than others, the various measures implemented during these Covid-times have badly disrupted what can be discerned from anecdotal reports.
I am guessing and hoping you have now cleared the hurdle obstructing your path to the oath. Wish I could offer more insight into the timeline from here, but it is just too hard to tell. (I recently was having a conversation with another forum participant, to whom I likewise said it looked like whatever issue there was has been resolved, and the oath could be scheduled soon or . . . and, right in the middle of the exchanges between us, that member of the forum got notice for the oath. BUT in contrast, I have had other similar conversations and it was many months later they got the oath invite, and more than a few others are still waiting.)
What does "background" check mean?
I have discussed the difference between the formal background clearances and IRCC's background screening of applicant information itself at length, in-depth multiple times in this forum, probably in some of the other topics referring to background checks in the title. Many conflate these rather different procedures. As I noted, for the vast majority of qualified applicants, the formal background clearances, from the RCMP and CSIS, are perhaps the most routinely done routine processing of citizenship applications. The extent to which IRCC can go probing into an applicant's background otherwise, or have CBSA do the probing, is a separate matter, and at the opposite end of the routine-versus-non-routine spectrum.
