When readily available New Zealand Police held information is insufficient to make a decision on whether it is relevant to the role the applicant is being vetted for, or sufficiently substantiated to justify release to the requesting agency the application will be put ‘Under Review’. This may occur for a number of reasons, for example; it relates to historic information that needs to be corroborated by requesting and reviewing an investigation file, escalating the vetting request through an internal review process because of the sensitivity of the content or a current investigation that the applicant is unaware of and should not be alerted to. Alternately it may be that the detail available is ambiguous and turns out not to be relevant in any way to the applicant or the role they are seeking, so should not be considered in any way for vetting purposes, e.g. allegation of an offence that was proven to be malicious.

The risk of not seeking and appropriately reviewing further detail is that there may be a failure to disclose information that should be released, which puts a child or vulnerable person at risk, or, conversely, that incorrect information about an applicant is prematurely released which breaches their privacy and damages their chance of being engaged by the agency. Therefore, where a vetting result is held back because of this process it should not be taken as negative reflection on an applicant while the review process is being completed. This process may take longer than the service level agreement and cannot be responded to in any detail.