Guidance

Complaints

Updated 20 August 2019

1. Unregulated Advisers Giving Immigration Advice

The OISC is dedicated to improving the availability of good quality immigration advice throughout the UK and a big part of that is reducing the amount of unregulated advisers. In order to do that to the best of our ability, we need your help, by letting us know of any encounters with unregulated advisers that you or anyone you know may have had.

Giving immigration advice while not registered with the OISC or another legal services regulator is a criminal offence and one that the OISC takes very seriously.

Unregulated advisers can cause huge problems for their victims, potentially doing irreparable damage to their immigration status and the ability of both them and their family to remain in the UK, whilst charging their victims large sums of money. Often these unregulated advisers will disappear suddenly, leaving serious problems behind for those they have targeted.

If you have fallen prey to an unregulated adviser, the first thing you should do is get in touch with a regulated professional immigration adviser, who will be able to try and help undo any damage done to your immigration status.

After that, you should also make a complaint to the OISC, if possible using our complaint form, which can be found here. The information you provide to us will be handled with complete confidentiality. Should you wish you can ask to remain anonymous and you can also make a complaint on behalf of someone else.

However you may wish to proceed, if you have been the victim of an unregulated adviser, we would encourage you to contact us.

At the OISC we have a dedicated team of investigators who are responsible for looking into all allegations of unregulated advice. Their work can lead to unregulated advisers facing prosecution which can lead to large fines and sometimes prison sentences. After you make a complaint to us about an unregulated adviser it will be allocated to our intelligence team, who will analyse it, and, if it is something that we are able to investigate, will allocate it to an investigator who will contact you to discuss the investigation and let you know what the next steps will be.

2. Complaints against OISC advisers

The organisations we regulate and the individuals who work there have standards set by us which they must follow click here. All organisations in our scheme have to apply to renew their registration annually. This allows us to check they are still operating properly and if we find they are not, gives us the opportunity to take action against them and if necessary, remove their license to practise, to ensure that consumers are always protected.

We provide guidance to all organisations on how they can meet our standards and we carry out premises audits of those organisations in our scheme, to help them maintain them. We work with all regulated organisations to make sure that you receive the best possible advice and services. Despite this, there may be occasions where you feel that the service you have received has not been what you expected. When that happens, OISC regulations ensure that each regulated organisation will have a complaint process that sets out how your complaint will be dealt with and ensures that the investigation will be timely, thorough and professional.

If you are dissatisfied with the services or advice you have been provided with, it is a good idea to talk to your adviser first, as they may be able to resolve your issue quickly, or provide you with a remedy quicker than the OISC can. If you have already spoken to your adviser and you are still dissatisfied, or if you do not wish to contact your adviser first, you can complain to the OISC. Details on how you can complain can be found here.

Once you have complained to us, we will assess your complaint to make sure that we can investigate it. If it is about immigration but relates to an organisation we do not regulate, we will refer your complaint on to the body that can investigate it. We will confirm with you the details of the body that we have referred your complaint on to and make sure that it has been received and is being looked into.

If your complaint relates to a matter that we can investigate, it will be usually allocated to an OISC caseworker, who will contact you to introduce themselves and talk you through the investigation process, which can take up to five months to complete. You will receive regular updates from your caseworker during the investigation process and will be provided with copies of all relevant written correspondence that is generated by us.

The only types of complaint that this process does not apply to, are redirected ones. For more information on the redirection process, see below.

3. Redirection of Complaints

The OISC operates a scheme where it will redirect certain complaints back to the complained about organisation if certain criteria are met. This usually means that the complaint is resolved quicker than if the OISC were to carry out their own enquiry. We will always discuss this with you first before taking the decision on whether or not to redirect. More information on the redirection process can be found here.