Day 224 - Recognizing Fraud

image of an "official" document by storebukkebruse,
via Flickr.com

During my consultations before going to Barbados, I went through the fraud file in the Washington office that handled visa issues. Every country has a fraud file. The details in the file depend on the country. The Barbados fraud file was full of examples of fraudulent documents submitted by both immigrant and non-immigrant visa applicants. The characteristics of these documents that made them recognizable included computer-generated letterhead, formulaic language, multiple documents submitted to support an application all typed on the same typewriter.

Clearly, I thought, there was a problem with fraud in Barbados. When I arrived, I volunteered to serve as the anti-fraud officer. I set out to detect fraud conscientiously.

I did find many examples of documents I considered fraudulent, but when I showed them to my boss, Margaret, the Consul, she seemed unimpressed. She pointed out what I had had a hard time learning during my first consular tour, that for non-immigrant visas, there are few documents required. What is required is that the applicant provide a convincing explanation for the purpose of the trip and of their intention to return to their home country at the end of the trip. But, there are documentary requirements for immigrant visas. When Margaret arrived, she discovered that her predecessor had placed so much emphasis on proper documentation being submitted that all applicants for any type of visa concluded that they needed to provide a letter from a bank stating how much was in their account, a letter from an employer stating how long they had worked for the company and what their salary is, a letter from the travel agent with the itinerary, and a letter from a religious or political leader stating how reliable they were in order to get a visa. As a result, a cottage industry had grown up around providing these documents.

image of itinerary by aja, via Flickr.com

Margaret's advice was to put all those documents to one side, conduct the interview without them, and then look at the documents only if the applicant's explanation made sense. If the applicant's story didn't make sense, the documents weren't going to make the explanation work. And if the explanation made sense, it was unlikely that the documents would undermine the explanation. Her goal was to dissuade applicants for non-immigrant visas from bringing in stacks of documents so we could concentrate on what immigrant visa applicants were required to provide.

And that is where there was previous evidence of fraud, at least from the American perspective. There was a bit of cultural clash when it came to family ties, one of the two main bases for immigration - family unification and economic development. The Bajan pattern of women having children but not marrying the father of the children meant that the usual evidence of the relationship between father and child did not exist. That was incentive for evidence being created by the document mills.

Some women either didn't or couldn't have children themselves. In some of these cases, the Bajan acceptance of community responsibility kicked in. More than once I interviewed a woman who planned to travel with her "child" to the U.S., but the child was a niece or nephew, not the woman's daughter or son. She had stepped in to raise a child that a sister or aunt or good friend was having difficulty raising. It was informal adoption, again not something U.S. law recognized. That was another incentive for using the document mills.

There was another Caribbean curiosity referred to as either sous sous or a meeting that visa applicants referred to when we asked how the applicant was planning to pay for the trip. Their answer was along the line of "It's my turn." I needed a translation. A meeting wasn't really a meeting. It was an informal savings club. Every week, the members of the meeting pooled a fixed amount of money, usually 100 Bajan dollars each. The members were on a roster. The pooled money went to whoever's name was at the top. After that member's turn, his or her name went to the bottom of the list. There was no bank involved. That was another incentive for using the document mills.

I was right about there being a fraud problem in Barbados. I just wasn't right about what it was. The problem was a cultural conflict, misunderstood on both sides.

At the point I figured out what fraud looked like in Barbados, I was transferred from the consular section into the budget and fiscal section for my second chance at a first impression.