Responding to a Procedural Fairness Letter

A Procedural Fairness Letter, usually called a PFL, means an IRCC officer has a specific concern about your application and is required to give you the chance to answer it before deciding.

Read that again, because in the panic most people miss it. A PFL is not a refusal. It is the officer telling you in advance exactly what is about to sink your application, and giving you one opportunity to fix it.

At SAAB Immigration we respond to procedural fairness letters constantly, across study permits, work permits, spousal sponsorship, Express Entry and permanent resident cases. We know what officers are looking for in an answer, because we have seen what satisfies them and what does not.

Officers issue a procedural fairness letter when they are looking at something that would lead them to refuse, and fairness requires that you get to answer it first. The concern is usually one of these:

• Suspected misrepresentation
  a document the officer believes may not be genuine, an inconsistency between what you declared and what they found, or an omission such as an undeclared family member, a prior refusal, or an earlier application under a different name.
• Document authenticity
  employment letters, bank statements, educational credentials or language test results the officer wants independently verified.
• Genuineness of a relationship
  in spousal and common-law sponsorship, a concern that the relationship was entered into primarily for immigration purposes.
• Job offer or LMIA concerns
  doubts about whether the employer is legitimate, the position genuine, or the wage accurate.
• Inadmissibility
  criminality, medical inadmissibility, security concerns, or an issue arising from a family member.

Your letter will identify which one applies. Everything about a successful response depends on answering that specific concern, with evidence, rather than re-explaining your application in general terms.

Every procedural fairness letter is serious. A misrepresentation procedural fairness letter is in a category of its own.

Under section 40 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, a finding of misrepresentation under section 40 of IRPA makes you inadmissible to Canada and carries a five year bar on applying. It attaches to you personally rather than to the application. It follows you into every future application, it has to be disclosed, and some countries share this information.

Misrepresentation also does not require that you intended to deceive. Innocent errors, omissions made on an agent’s advice, and mistakes you did not personally make can still support a finding if the officer concludes they could have induced an error in the administration of the Act. Saying that your agent completed the forms is not on its own an answer, although how the error happened is often central to the response.

A response that works addresses materiality, addresses intent, proves the true facts with documents, and where there was an error explains it credibly instead of denying it. This is precise work, and the cost of getting it wrong is five years of your life.

A response is a submission, not a form. There is no template that works, because the entire exercise is answering one officer’s one concern. Strong responses share a structure:

• Answer the concern in the first paragraph
  officers read hundreds of these. Do not bury your answer under background.
• Provide evidence, not assurances
  if the officer doubts your employment letter, send payroll records, tax filings, a corporate registry extract, and a named contact who will verify it. Stating that the letter is genuine adds nothing.
• Explain discrepancies instead of avoiding them
  if something is inconsistent, name it and account for it. Officers notice what you step around.
• Address the legal test
  for misrepresentation that means materiality. For relationship genuineness it means the factors set out in the Regulations.
• Index your evidence clearly
  so the officer can find what you have sent without hunting for it.

If you do not answer the procedural fairness letter, the officer decides on the record already in front of them, which is the record that concerned them in the first place. In practice that means refusal.

It also closes doors you may want later. If you are refused after failing to answer a PFL, you cannot credibly argue at the Federal Court that you were denied procedural fairness, because you were given it and did not use it. The procedural fairness letter is the fairness. Once it has been offered, that argument is gone.

This is why the PFL stage is the single best opportunity in your file to change the outcome. Answering it properly now is faster, simpler and far more likely to succeed than challenging a refusal at the Federal Court later.

1. We start with the letter and your file, not a template.
   We read precisely what the officer alleges, then read your original application to find what triggered it. Very often the concern comes from something the applicant never realized was in the file at all.
2. We obtain the GCMS notes where time allows.
   The notes usually reveal more of the officer’s thinking than the letter does. Where the deadline is short, we respond first and request the notes in parallel.
3. We build the evidence package.
   This is the bulk of the work: identifying what would actually satisfy the officer’s concern, and obtaining it in a form they will accept, inside your deadline.
4. We write submissions that engage the legal test.
   Not a letter explaining that you are a good person, but a submission addressing materiality, intent, genuineness, or whichever test governs your case.
5. We ground the submission in the case law.
   Where the Federal Court has already decided the issue in front of you, whether that is what makes an omission material, what an officer is required to put to you, or when a concern is not reasonably held, we say so and we cite it. A submission that engages with settled law reads differently from one that only asserts.
6. We tell you honestly where you stand.
   Some procedural fairness letters are highly answerable. Some are not. You will know which one you have before you commit to anything.

You can read how this plays out on real files in our case studies, including a 16 year old spousal sponsorship refusal we overturned, a PGWP restoration granted after loss of status, and the five mistakes that most often lead to study permit and PGWP refusals.

Dikshit Soni, RCIC (R536007) acts as your authorized representative for the response. If your matter later needs the Federal Court, it is handled by Dr. Pallavi Kataria of Pallavi Law Office, and we stay on the file alongside her.

• Judicial Review of an IRCC Refusal
• Immigration Appeals
• Immigration Refusals and Appeals
• Inadmissibility to Canada