If your complaints policy mentions Part 9, or promises that the practice will submit to mediation as recommended by the Authority, it is written against a Code that no longer exists.
The Code in force since 1 March 2022 has no complaints Part. The standalone duty to respond properly to a complaint is gone. The mediation requirement is gone — OMARA's own summary of the changes lists it as a removed provision. Nothing in the current instrument tells a practice how to run a complaints process.
That reads like a relaxation. It is closer to the opposite. The Code stopped prescribing the procedure and kept every provision that judges the outcome.
You must hand every client the instructions for complaining about you
Start here, because few practices frame it this way.
Section 38 says an agent must not give immigration assistance to a client unless a copy of the consumer guide has been given to them. Section 42(3)(d) then requires the service agreement itself to carry a statement that the guide was provided.
The consumer guide is the Authority's document. It sets out what a client can expect from a registered agent, what the Authority does, and how to complain. So the law obliges you to place in every client's hands, before you do any work for them, a document whose purpose includes telling them how to escalate past you.
OMARA's guidance is explicit that best practice is to provide the guide at the earliest reasonable opportunity rather than bundling it with the agreement as an afterthought. A practice that treats it as paperwork has misread what it is for. Clients who know how to complain properly tend to complain to you first. Clients who do not, complain to the regulator first.
Where a complaint actually lands
When a complaint reaches the Authority, it arrives at your practice with a precise legal shape: a request under section 32.
That section requires you to respond promptly, by any reasonable time the Authority specifies, and — the part most practices underestimate — the response must deal with each matter raised, answer any questions, and include all requested information or documents.
Compare that with the former duty, which asked only that you respond "properly". The current wording is a completeness test. A reply that addresses the substance but leaves two of six questions unanswered has not complied, however reasonable it reads.
The file is your answer
Section 56(9) sits alongside it: you must give the Authority access to a client file held by you or by anyone in your business, on written request.
Which means the real complaints procedure is the one you were running months earlier. By the time a complaint arrives, the record is closed. Either the advice is on the file, the estimate is on the file, the call where the client confirmed they understood is on the file — or, as far as anyone can now establish, none of it happened.
This is why file notes matter more than a complaints policy does. Section 55 requires a contemporaneous written record of oral communications with clients, covering both the instructions they give you and the advice you give them. Almost every complaint turns on one of those two things.
The provisions that bite while a complaint is open
A live complaint puts a practice under pressure at precisely the moment several duties are easiest to break.
Section 14 — treat all persons with appropriate respect. An agent must not harass or coerce any person, engage in unconscionable conduct targeted at another person, or victimise anyone on the basis of their status under the migration law, whether directly or indirectly. A complainant is very often a current client with a pending application and a visa that depends on you. Anything that could be read as leaning on that dependence becomes a serious problem in its own right, quite apart from the original complaint.
Section 13 — the general duty. Beyond acting professionally, competently, diligently and ethically, an agent must not engage in conduct, in any capacity, that is reasonably likely to damage the reputation of migration agents or the immigration advice industry. A dismissive or public response can breach this even where the underlying work was faultless.
Confidentiality cuts both ways
Section 35 prohibits disclosing personal information about a client or former client, or their affairs, to a third person without the client's written consent, except as required by law.
Complaints frequently arrive from someone who is not the client: a sponsor, a spouse, a family member who paid, an employer. Answering them with the detail you need to defend yourself is a disclosure. Establish whether the complainant is a client of the practice before you respond to anything — our guide to fee disclosure and client agreements covers why the person paying is so often not the person you act for.
A staff member's mistake is your complaint
The former Code said the duty to respond covered work carried out by the agent or the agent's employee. That sentence went with the rest of Part 9, but the substance survives in a stronger form.
Section 24 requires an agent to take all reasonable steps to ensure the quality, accuracy and timeliness of work performed by another person to assist them, or under a service agreement for which they are a responsible migration agent. OMARA's guidance on practice management duties spells out what that looks like: reviewing applications before lodgement, recording internal discussions about client matters, running regular training on Code requirements.
One boundary is worth knowing. That duty does not extend to work carried out by another registered migration agent — between two RMAs, each answers for their own conduct. And "employee" reaches further than it looks: the Code's definition takes in consultants, independent contractors and volunteers.
Designing the procedure anyway
Nothing requires you to have a written complaints process. Everything about how the Code now works rewards having one.
- Publish a route in. A named person, an address, a response time. A complaint you never receive still becomes a section 32 request eventually — just with the Authority holding the file first.
- Acknowledge quickly and in writing, without conceding. The acknowledgement is itself part of the record.
- Separate the reviewer from the person complained about, as far as your size allows. In a small practice, say so honestly rather than claiming an independence you do not have.
- Establish who the complainant is before disclosing anything about the matter.
- Settle the money first where money is in issue. Refunds are due promptly and no later than 14 days after they become payable, so a disputed balance you are still holding is a second breach sitting behind the first.
- Write the outcome to the client file, not to a complaints register nobody links to the matter. The Authority asks for the file.
- Feed the finding back into procedure. A second complaint of the same shape is far harder to explain than the first.
The complaint-readiness test
Pick a matter that ended badly and ask:
- Can you show the consumer guide was given, and when?
- Is the advice the client says they never received actually on the file, in writing?
- Are the client's oral instructions recorded contemporaneously, or reconstructed afterwards?
- Does the file hold the estimate, the agreement, and every variation?
- If the Authority asked six questions today, could you answer all six, with documents attached, promptly?
- Is there anything in the correspondence that could read as pressure on a client with a pending visa?
Where a system helps
Complaints expose whatever the practice was already doing. No policy document rescues a file with three months of undocumented phone calls in the middle of it.
What helps is unremarkable infrastructure: notes captured during the call rather than reconstructed from memory, correspondence stored against the matter instead of in one person's mailbox, fee variations recorded as events, and a file you can produce whole without assembling it from four systems.
LodgeHQ keeps the record as a by-product of doing the work, which is the only version of record-keeping that survives a bad month. Start a free trial and see what your files would look like to someone reading them cold.
Verify before you rely on it
Outcomes can include a caution, suspension, cancellation of registration, or a bar on re-registering for up to five years, so this is not an area to run on inherited templates. Check the current sources: OMARA's Code of Conduct page, the prescribed Code text, and the Regulations on the Federal Register.
This is general information for migration practices, not legal advice. If a complaint has been made against you or your practice, get advice on that complaint.