Security concerns over UK visas being issued by two private companies

The sensational news has left the UK immigration officials baffled and astonished.

It was found that a large number of applicants for the UK visas were being sent to the commercially run offices in different parts of the world. There is no need for the applicants to reach the UK embassy for filling of the UK visa application form and the plan also saves the applicants from facing the UK immigration officials for interview.

The whole process was being done online and the applicants desirous of getting a UK visa were required to fill an online form on the site of a US based company.

In the year 2007, a US (Virginia) based firm named CSC (Computer Services Corporation) along with VSF Global, a Swiss-based travel firm, was able to get £300 million contract for a period of five years for outsourcing visa checks for the UK.

The whole process of issuing UK visas by these two private bogus firms is handled by local staff that neither comprises of diplomats nor trained immigration officials. The staff is also entrusted with the work of scanning faces and fingerprints of the applicants in the biometric visas for finding the illegal or bogus candidates.

Once this is done, the applications are then forwarded to the officials of the UK Home Office to get a final nod on the issuance or denial of the UK visa. 

However, the ‘tick box system’ has apparently made it quite simple for the bogus applicants as well as potential terrorists desirous of UK visas to easily sneak through the whole process.

The substitution of the crucial face-to-face interview by the officials of the British embassy with a system requiring just filling of the form along with requisite documents has made the scam fool-proof, argues director for the Middle East in the Foreign Office and a former British Ambassador, Sir Andrew Green. He also runs Migration Watch (the pressure group).

Both VSF Global and CSC are involved in dealing with nearly 80 percent of the total UK visa applications (2.75 million) annually from foreign students, tourists, business men and foreign government representatives hailing from nearly 109 nations, out of which nearly 2 million are successful.