Tonga’s Immigration Department is under fire for delaying a citizen’s passport application because the required documents were told to be sent to an Immigration officer’s private email address.
A complainant claimed he later discovered his application was stuck in limbo after the officer who owned the email address failed to show up for work.
Tongan software engineer and transparency advocate Edwin Liava’a publicly criticised the government’s reliance on Gmail, calling it “a glaring failure in basic governance.”
He shared a troubling experience with the Tonga Immigration Department, saying his passport application was delayed because an immigration officer instructed him to send sensitive documents to a personal Gmail address.
The Immigration Department could not be reached for comment.
“This morning, I visited the Immigration Department to collect my passport”, Liava’a said.
“According to their standard processing timeframe, new applications should be completed within one week.
“Instead, I discovered my application was on hold, not due to any complex issue, but because I was requested by an immigration officer to send requested information to her personal Gmail address, but she was absent from work today.
“More concerning was when I was told to resend my documents to “tongaimmigration@gmail.com”, a Gmail address being used as the official email address for the entire Immigration Department”.
Liava’a was surprised that the Immigration Department lacks a professional government email domain.
“Even worse, at the time of writing this blog, I still have not received any feedback regarding my document submission.
“I have no idea if my documents were received or are being processed.”
The incident has revived criticism over officials’ use of unsecured private emails for sensitive state business, raising urgent questions about transparency, efficiency, and data protection in public services.
“Somehow, ordinary citizens are left completely in the dark with no feedback whatsoever. This represents an extremely poor level of service to citizens who pay the taxes that fund civil servants’ paychecks”, Liava’a said.
He said that when he followed up, he was redirected to tongaimmigration@gmail.com—a Gmail account being used as the department’s primary contact.
He said the government’s “information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure is fundamentally broken and disconnected. Despite various attempts at establishing e-Governance initiatives with donor funding, most efforts have failed to deliver cohesive, sustainable results”.
Tonga digitisation projects
This failure occurs despite international funding and repeated commitments to digitally modernise Tonga’s bureaucracy.
In 2023, Tonga joined the EU-funded Pacific Digital Democracy Project (PDDP), a UNDP-led initiative to transform digital governance across the Pacific.
As one of four participating nations, Tonga committed to advancing digital rights and development through government-civil society partnerships.
The project focuses on three key pillars, including strengthening online safety, countering disinformation, and developing e-government systems to enable citizen participation, laying the groundwork for sustainable digital transformation.
This issue raises important questions about transparency and accountability, as well as the slow progress of democratic reforms in the kingdom, a key theme in last month’s nation-development summit held by the government in Nuku’alofa.
The government appeared to have no policies to enforce government officials and civil servants to use government and official emails.
Kaniva News can confirm that ministers and civil servants routinely communicated and conducted state business using private email accounts, even though parliament and government officials frequently emphasised the importance of transparency at public events.
We also observed that several government websites are either outdated or currently unavailable.
