Officials of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) have been suspected of corruption
According to the high-ranking official, more than 18,000 asylum applications filed in recent months will be rechecked. As "Russkaya Germaniya" notes, inspections are planned in those regional offices where the rate of positive processing of applications is either significantly higher or significantly lower than the national average. In this way, Ms. Cordt responded to ongoing criticism of the agency she heads, which many politicians believe is currently in a serious crisis.
The immediate cause of the inspections was a scandal at the Bremen branch of BAMF, where several employees, including the head of the office, were suspected of corruption. According to the Bremen public prosecutor's office, local migration office officials issued more than two thousand decisions granting refugee status to immigrants who had no legal basis for it between 2013 and 2017.
Particularly noteworthy is that only about one hundred asylum applications were submitted by foreigners actually residing in the state of Bremen. All other applications came from foreign nationals registered in Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia. It got to the point that entire buses of illegal immigrants arrived in Bremen accompanied by lawyers solely to register there as refugees and then obtain the coveted status.
According to journalists, many asylum seekers paid their lawyers a thousand euros each, after which they received refugee status in Bremen. Among them were allegedly even possible smugglers secretly bringing in immigrants.
The Bremen prosecutor's investigation will take about three months. During the investigation, nearly 70 employees of the Bremen branch have been suspended from work. Jutta Cordt herself stated that she has no data on similar manipulations in other offices, but her employees have indeed found cases where average figures in a number of branch offices diverge from the overall quotas.
Meanwhile, according to data that has reached the press, BAMF leadership learned of the abuses at the Bremen branch not in recent weeks, but much earlier. It is claimed, in particular, that such information first reached BAMF headquarters in Nuremberg back in February 2017. However, the top officials of the federal agency not only failed to respond appropriately to the facts of abuse available at that time, but also preferred to "sweep this information under the rug." Allegedly, an instruction came from the very top of the agency that "digging further" was not advisable here.
According to official data from the German Federal Ministry of the Interior, since the beginning of the migration crisis, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees has not rechecked even one percent of asylum decisions. For example, from January 2015 to March 2018, out of 1.65 million decisions, only 11,830 were checked, which is only 0.7%. The agency, meanwhile, claims that control checks were impossible due to serious staffing problems.
Now, not only the head of the Ministry of the Interior, Horst Seehofer, under whose responsibility BAMF falls, but also members of the Bundestag intend to deal with this situation. Mr. Seehofer has already stated that he intends to make "personnel changes" at BAMF in connection with the scandal. "In the coming weeks, I will make decisions on organizational changes in the agency's work," the minister noted.
In turn, the parliamentary factions of the Free Democrats (FDP) and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) demanded the creation of a special Bundestag commission to investigate possible cases of corruption in the Federal Migration Office. A decision on such a commission requires the votes of a quarter of Bundestag deputies. Thus, in addition to the FDP and AfD, another faction of the country's main parliament must vote "yes." It is possible that this will be the faction of the Left Party (Die Linke).
Already now, BAMF is taking measures to reorganize the work with interpreters who are involved in working with asylum seekers in Germany. Currently, about 5,800 such interpreters work in the agency's regional offices, of which only 620 have been sworn in.
In April of last year, BAMF terminated cooperation with more than two thousand interpreters. The reason for this step was either significant complaints regarding the neutrality of their work, or problems with trust, compliance with deadlines, or general standards. In Bremen itself, one interpreter was suspected of outright manipulation when working with asylum applications.
For current and new BAMF interpreters, special seminars and courses will be conducted, with a particular focus on working with asylum requests. The goal of these seminars should be to improve the situation with the "specialized training" of a significant number of interpreters who have received serious critical remarks.