Hi
ASMB said:
Hi Ben,
I am a bit worried and need to understand the reason why AEO applicants are getting this letter. All this is checked by HRSDC before approving the AEO then why is Visa Office doing a second check on the authenticity of an approved AEO.
You may wish to read the following statement from a review of Skilled Worker Program and AEOs.
The case studies showed that the quality of applications with AEOs varies across the missions. For example, the Buffalo office reports that most AEOs are approved and points
awarded (about 90%),
while the New Delhi office estimated an acceptance rate of about 30%. New Delhi officers have been compiling information on small businesses that have
made multiple job offers.
Examples of fraudulent AEO applications include job offers from non-existent employers, fictitious positions incompatible with the type of business or business operations, offers of
convenience from friends or family members, and genuine offers with inflated job descriptions.
There is also a concern in CVOAs that AEOs can be purchased and that clients
are being lured to pay large fees to consultants for job offers that they believe await them in Canada. Fraud is generally hard to prove, and AEO fraud-related refusals cannot be
extracted from the administrative systems. Some visa offices are conducting independent investigations in an effort to demonstrate the lack of integrity and level of fraud associated
with AEOs.
In the interviews, CVOA staff (particularly those from Hong Kong and New Delhi) indicated that applicants often use AEOs to compensate for not receiving sufficient points
under the language or education criteria (or more recently, as a means to by-pass Ministerial Instructions and the list of 38 occupations; the percentage of FSWs with AEOs has
increased significantly since the introduction of Ministerial Instructions in 2008. Visa officers in Hong Kong believe that the increase in AEO applications under IRPA has at
least to some extent impacted the drop in the approval rates in recent years. For example, as outlined in Table 3-4, the Hong Kong office has seen a significant increase in AEO
applications, most notably in the last few years, and a significant drop in approval rates (
from over 90% at the time of IRPA implementation to just over 40% in 2007, and to only 24% in
2008 - likely due to the introduction of Ministerial Instructions). In the view of the visa office staff, this trend might have been, at least in part, the result of applicants abusing AEO
in the desire to compensate for lower scores on other criteria (e.g. English language skills) or to get a priority assessment.