(Image source from: Timesofindia.indiatimes.com)

The Government of United Kingdom has agreed to reappraise the cases of hundreds of extremely proficient Indian professionals being contradict their right to live and work in the country over fiddling tax corrections.

Caroline Nokes, Britain's Home Office minister for immigration, was grilled by the authoritative Home Affairs Committee over media reports that non-recreational who came in on a Tier 1 (General) are being refused their Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) over minor, legally acceptable corrections in their tax returns.

John Woodcock, an Independent MP from the committee questioned saying, "This potentially sends a terrible signal, does it not, to highly skilled people of Indian or Pakistani origin who have come over here and have contributed to the country, bringing their skills.”

Ms Nokes replied, "Of course, I do not want this country to look like it is unwelcoming to people with high skills who have contributed a great deal. It is important to us that going forward we make sure we have culture change in the Home Office."

The Labour Party politician, Yvette Cooper, demanded, “why the minister had not asked for a review of HMRC [Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs] related Tier 1 cases to find out how many of them might be serious fraud cases and how many of them might be trivial mistakes that any one of us could have made?”

Ms Nokes assured the committee that a revaluation will be undertaken to establish whether, "there is a pattern here in what has gone wrong and whether they are minor errors.”

Sir Philip Rutnam, Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, told the committee that, he will be looking into evidence to see how many of these refusals are the result of a clear-cut case of deception and where perhaps overzealous officials have been erring on the side of doubting people rather than giving them the benefit of the doubt.

The smitten professionals, such as doctors, academics and entrepreneurs, are all from non-European Union countries suchlike India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria who are based in the UK on a Tier 1 (General) visa. They were entitled to apply for Indefinite leave to remain or permanent residency status after a minimum of five years' in the UK. While the visa category itself was interrupted in 2011, erstwhile applicants were eligible to apply for ILR until April this year if they met the necessary requirements.

Nevertheless, judicial experts noted a pattern of many such applications being turned down by Home Office caseworkers on the basis of Rule 322(5), a discretion rule relating to an applicant's good attribute. Many of the professionals have since resorted to legally demand the Home Office's approach of using a minor tax correction to classify them as "undesirable" migrants.

Aditi Bhardwaj, the coordinator of the Highly Skilled Migrants group which has been protesting over such unfair refusals of ILR applications and whose team is now preparing its own dossier of evidence for the Home Affairs Select Committee, declared the UK government's review into the cases a, minor victory.

“But there is a long way to go. Let us see how the Home Office proceeds on this review. It is shocking that the minister claims to have been unaware of these cases, when we have documentary evidence to prove that she had been made aware of this issue with Tier 1 applicants back in March.”

By Sowmya