COMPLAINT CASES REVEAL SYSTEM ERRORS made a decision. We submitted the case once again to the Ministry of Integration as the appeal authority, this time as a complaint about the additional time the Immigration Service was taking to process the case. In December 2009, the Ministry once again criticised the case processing time at the Immigration Service, which granted family reunification to the wife later that month. As far as the couple were concerned, the case was over, but it subsequently influenced the administration culture at the Ministry of Integration. When the man wrote to the Ombudsman for the second time, the Ministry explained that, following its initial criticism of the Immigration Service, it had closed and filed the case. A reminder was not attached to the case (i.e. it was not automatically revisited) and the Ministry had not checked whether the Immigration Service had complied with its request for quick processing. We therefore wrote to the Ministry of Integration to ask whether it did not follow up on cases in which it had criticised the Immigration Service’s case processing time. We wanted to know whether the Ministry did not revisit the cases at its own initiative after a period of time to ask about their status at the Immigration Service. The Ministry replied that there was no formalised follow-up procedure and promised to review this issue with the Immigration Service. With effect from April 2010, the Ministry then introduced a formalised procedure for following up on cases which had led to criticism of the Immigration Service’s case processing and which were still pending there. In such cases, the Ministry will ask the Immigration Service for an update on the status of the case within two months of expressing criticism. If the case is still pending, the Ministry will in each individual case assess whether it needs to request another status update after a new, individual deadline has been set. UNANSWERED QUESTIONS The last example concerns a man from Aalborg who in July 2008 tried to help a Vietnamese acquaintance by sending a letter to the Ministry of Integration with some questions about family reunification. Soon afterwards, he was informed that the questions had been forwarded to the Immigration Service. However, he did not receive a reply from the Immigration Service and therefore sent it a reminder, with no result. He then wrote again to the Ministry of Integration, which reacted by forwarding his enquiry to the Immigration Service once more. The man still did not receive any replies to his questions and in September 2008 lodged a complaint with the Ombudsman about the lack of reply. The man used the expression ‘deafening silence’. 25