People reading Global Case Management System notes may come across the acronyms RAU or RAO. RAO stands for Risk Assessment Officer. RAU stands for Risk Assessment Unit.
The following is a summary of a PDF obtained through ATIP about IRCC’s Risk Assessment Units.
In 2016, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (“IRCC”) established a Regional Assessment Office model to establish Risk Assessment Units in a third of IRCC’s overseas visa office. As of August 2021, there are 19 Risk Assessment Officers overseas who are supported by locally engaged staff.
Risk Assessment Officers are responsible for:
- anti-fraud;
- document verification;
- security reviews;
- strengthening the integrity of overseas program delivery;
- risk and intelligence reporting; and
- operational partner liaison.
The goal of IRCC’s risk assessment functions are:
- support delivery of the IRCC mandate to manage Canada’s migration programs for the social and economic benefit of Canada by ensuring that all persons who apply for migration to Canada, whether for temporary purposes or permanently, are both eligible to do so and admissible, and meet all the criteria in the category under which they have applied;
- to help IRCC to maintain public confidence in Canada’s immigration system, which includes the continuum of immigration, refugee, citizenship, settlement and integration, and passport programs and services.
Specific Duties
Some of the specific duties of Risk Assessment Units include:
- Gathering and validating information, assessing risk, identifying trends, providing analysis and managing relationships to support decision-making and information products across the IRCC integrated network, contributing to the facilitation of bona fide applications, and the identification of risks.
- Performing program integrity activities including anti-fraud, document verification, quality assurance, quality control, and risk assessment; reporting on these activities to support decision-making across the network.
- Supporting the creation and maintenance of triage/referral criteria and risk indicators, and data analysis to feed automated triage and decision-making models. This includes conducting strategic and high-value verifications that contribute to developing quality risk indicators including for Chinook Module S (TR Indicator Management Module) and sharing these indicators with other work-sharing partners as applicable.