Wait after ITA submission

[farhanahmad]

Hi all,
I submitted my ITA(w/o job offer) in Feb 2013 but there is not a single email from them after that except that they received my ITA and will process it accordingly. Now its been like 3 months and still no information if a CO has been assigned or not.

Is it normal that they take huge time to even assign a case office? Should i make a contact with London branch?

[JandM]

All this is absolutely normal.

For one thing, it is possible you already have a CO: they do not all announce themselves, and there have been people on the forum whose first contact was a call wanting to arrange an interview, when all the paperwork was in order and the officer did not need to ask for further information. Many COs do not do 'empty' messages, since their priority is to advance cases. Several emails saying, 'Dear Mr A, I have received no more news on your case and am no nearer to completion,' could delay another case actually being resolved and a visa issued.

As other people will tell you, and you will see from dozens of past threads on here, mentions of time from INZ are more like hopeful guesses than definite statements. When going through the application process, there is an awful lot of 'hurry up and wait'. All the INZ officials are dealing with many cases as well as your own, and delays can arise from factors affecting others of those cases.

Everything at INZ works by managed queues. When your ITA was received, it would join the end of the queue of other ITAs, according to the date order. Each Case Officer has a certain workload - a number of cases that are theirs to deal with. The newly arrived ITAs have to wait till one of the COs has finished with some of their cases, and can take on some more. When an ITA is eventually assigned to a CO, it will again join the back of THAT queue for the CO's attention, as s/he takes the top file, does what s/he can actively do, puts that file to the back, works everything s/he can on that case, goes to the next, and so on.

There is no way to tell how many other people's ITAs were in the queue to be assigned already, on the day yours arrived. There is no way to tell how easy or difficult the cases already being worked in the office are turning out to be, which affects the time passing until COs are ready to take more files into their personal allocation. There is no way to tell if three experienced COs in that office might leave and need to be replaced, with the new COs needing training. There is no way to tell if there could be a flu epidemic affecting the whole building. This is why INZ cannot promise anything about timings, and it's never really a matter of 'just assigning' a Case Officer.

[farhanahmad]

Thanx JandM for a detailed reply. Ill wait for their response then. Much appreciated.