Procedural Instruction: Public Interest Criteria (PIC) 4004 – outstanding debts to the Commonwealth

Written by Claude Haiku 5.5 from the extracted text on 21 Oct 2026. It can miss or misread redacted and scanned pages. Check the source before relying on it.

This FOI release is a Department of Home Affairs procedural instruction, dated for the 2026 release, setting out how visa decision makers under s65 of the Migration Act 1958 apply Public Interest Criterion 4004, which requires applicants to have no outstanding debts to the Commonwealth unless appropriate payment arrangements are in place. It covers debts owed to the Department (such as removal and detention costs, litigation costs, SRSS overpayments and customs duty), their recording on the Central Movement Alert List under Alert Reason Code 12, and the roles of the Debt Management Unit, instalment plans, and PGPA Act waiver and write-off powers. It does not contain operational statistics, detention populations, or cyber or critical infrastructure assessments. Staff debt is expressly out of scope.