Passport being returned to the owner with visa application still pending?

[skadsuh]

On my previous thread here I ask about the visa conversion. Now, last week my partner talked to our officer and agreed about visa conversion. The officer told her that she will take care of the conversion. After submitting the INZ 1025 we never had any email from her aside from an automated we received yesterday, saying "Thank you for your Visitor's visa application. Your application was received by us on 23/02/2018" This is the date we lodge the initial application which was a Work visa under partnership but the email is saying Visitor's visa. That's supposed to be a Work visa. We just agreed on the visitor visa conversion last week. Now, we received just now, a text message that her passport was being returned together with the proof and evidence we provided on our initial visa application. I am very confuse. We haven't had any confirmation about the converted visa application yet. Why would they return it? This is becoming a mess. Should I call the immigration here? On the converted visa, the officer required us to submit the INZ 1025. I emailed the scanned document INZ 1025 together with JOP signature and my rental agreement. The other requirement of INZ 1025 has been provided on our initial visa application(work visa). Now they are returning it without any information about the status of the converted visa. Why is that? What's going on? Is this the correct process?

[JandM]

I can understand that you would like to know immediately what is happening, but it's not possible for any of us to tell you. It often happens that emails, texts and letters received from INZ are form letters - that is, a ready-prepared choice of words that will ROUGHLY fit various kinds of case, but don't necessarily tell you about your individual affairs. I suspect that may be what you have had. You will need to wait till the package arrives from INZ, then react to what is actually in there. If you tried to contact anybody now, you wouldn't be able to tell them what it is you want to ask, because that will be different depending on what your CO has actually sent you.

[skadsuh]

Does this happen often to other people? It is a bit worrying. Cause we just don't know what is going on

[JandM]

Yes, it's a common happening for people not to understand at times what is going on. I know it's hard to be patient, but that's the only thing to do at the moment. Hold onto the thought that the CO actually said to your partner that she is doing the conversion - she wouldn't have said it if she didn't mean it.

Another thought occurs to me. It is standard practice for INZ to return some or all of people's evidence after it has been recorded as seen, and anything necessary copied into the system, because they don't NEED to clutter up their office with lots of paperwork that has served its purpose. Also, they quite often don't keep an applicant's passport during all the time of processing. It's a document that people sometimes prefer to have with them, and, again, INZ won't need it until all the processing has finished. So this may be the explanation of the package that is coming to you.

[JenKnox]

As far as I'm aware, Visitor and Work visas do not require any printed out labels and are issued as electronic visas these days. So as long as there is no special request on your side, there would be no "physical" visa in your passport.
Before I had visa labels stuck in my passport. However, when I had applied for a work visa in Sep 2017, my passport was returned to me in a couple of weeks and an electronic work visa was issued a week later. They didn't ask me to send my passport again.