After Accreditation: Your Obligations and Surviving an INZ Audit

Employers often treat accreditation as a hurdle to clear — pass it, and move on. But accreditation is an ongoing status with continuing obligations attached, and Immigration New Zealand has made random compliance checks a permanent part of the system. The application is arguably the easy part; staying compliant afterwards is where the real, lasting risk sits.

The obligations that don't end at approval

Once you're accredited, you're committing to keep meeting a set of standards for the life of your accreditation. The key ones include:

• Settlement support. You must provide new migrant workers with information to help them settle into work and life in New Zealand — covering essentials — generally within the first month of their start date.
• Meeting the terms you agreed to. The commitments you made in your application aren't aspirational; you're expected to actually deliver them.
• Paying and employing correctly. Wages, hours, and conditions must match what was approved, and workers must only be employed consistent with their visa conditions.
• Keeping Immigration New Zealand informed. You're required to notify changes — including changes to key people, and when an AEWV worker leaves with a meaningful period still on their visa. Late notifications are a common compliance flag.

Where employers quietly fall out of compliance

Most compliance failures aren't dramatic. They're things like a worker doing work in a location their visa doesn't cover, settlement support that happened informally but was never documented, records that can't be produced when asked, or a key-person change that wasn't reported in time. None of these feel serious in the moment — until an audit asks you to prove otherwise.

What an audit actually tests

An audit is fundamentally a test of evidence: can you show, on paper, that you've done what you were required to do? It's not enough to have treated your workers well or run a tidy operation — you have to be able to demonstrate it. Employers who keep clear, contemporaneous records sail through. Those who relied on good intentions and informal practice are the ones who struggle, even when they've done nothing deliberately wrong.

The stakes: suspension and revocation

This is why it matters. If you can't satisfy a compliance check, your accreditation can be suspended or revoked. That doesn't just affect future hiring — it puts your existing migrant workforce in jeopardy, because their visas are tied to your accredited status. For labour-hire and high-volume employers especially, the fallout can be severe and hard to undo.

Every case is different

Obligations, notification rules, and audit expectations all change, and what "audit-ready" looks like depends on your accreditation type, your workforce, and your industry. Compliance is far cheaper to maintain than to repair, and the specifics of your situation are what determine your real exposure.