Twenty-three years of complaints about immigration advisers, in one place for the first time
The regulator has published the number every year since 2001 and has never published the series. Complaints peaked at 379 in 2009/10, fell to 67 in 2020/21, and doubled to 182 in 2024/25.
By Rose Traviss · 29 September 2026
There is no public register of regulated immigration advisers this site can read. The Immigration Advice Authority — the Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner until 2025 — serves its adviser search from an endpoint that does not answer without a name nobody publishes.
So everything below comes from somewhere else: twenty annual reports, laid end to end.
The series
Complaints received about advisers the regulator itself authorises:
| Year | Complaints | Year | Complaints | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2001/02 | 120 | 2013/14 | 268 | |
| 2002/03 | 120 | 2014/15 | 195 | |
| 2003/04 | 138 | 2015/16 | 225 | |
| 2004/05 | 238 | 2016/17 | 166 | |
| 2005/06 | 255 | 2017/18 | 142 | |
| 2006/07 | 239 | 2019/20 | 113 | |
| 2007/08 | 238 | 2020/21 | 67 | |
| 2008/09 | 280 | 2021/22 | 92 | |
| 2009/10 | 379 | 2022/23 | 69 | |
| 2010/11 | 316 | 2023/24 | 90 | |
| 2011/12 | 296 | 2024/25 | 182 | |
| 2012/13 | 290 |
2018/19 is missing. That year’s report gives its complaints figures only inside a two-column layout that does not survive being turned back into text, and no later report restates it.
The shape is a long climb to 2009/10, a long decline to a floor of 67 in 2020/21, and then a doubling in the most recent year on record. The 2024/25 figure is the highest since 2015/16 and more than twice the year before it.
None of that is in any single document. Every report prints its own year; the ones up to 2017/18 reprint the history in a table; the recent ones give a sentence with one comparative year in brackets.
Most of them are not about its own advisers
The regulator counts three kinds of complaint, and the ones about its own registrants are a minority of the total in most years.
In 2012/13 it received 290 complaints about advisers it regulated, 22 about advisers regulated by somebody else, and 113 about advisers with no regulator at all — 425 in total. Giving immigration advice while unregulated is a criminal offence under section 91 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, and about a quarter of the complaints this regulator received that year concerned people outside any regulatory scheme altogether.
Seven years later the mix had shifted further in that direction. In 2019/20 it received 113 complaints about its own advisers, 27 about advisers under another regulator and 87 about unregulated advisers — 227 in all, with the unregulated share up from 27% to 38%.
It prosecutes them
This is the part that makes the Immigration Advice Authority unlike every other regulator on this site. It brings criminal prosecutions, and it published the count every year until 2013/14.
| Year | Prosecutions | Formal cautions |
|---|---|---|
| 2001/02 | 1 | 0 |
| 2002/03 | 8 | 1 |
| 2003/04 | 13 | 3 |
| 2004/05 | 7 | 3 |
| 2005/06 | 14 | 8 |
| 2006/07 | 8 | 5 |
| 2007/08 | 15 | 28 |
| 2008/09 | 13 | 27 |
| 2009/10 | 26 | 9 |
| 2010/11 | 24 | 8 |
| 2011/12 | 14 | 4 |
| 2012/13 | 25 | 11 |
| 2013/14 | 14 | 3 |
| Total | 182 | 110 |
The regulator states the same totals itself in its 2013/14 report: “During the period 2001–14 the OISC successfully brought 182 prosecutions and administered a total of 110 formal cautions.” That sentence is the only check available on a table read out of a PDF by machine, and it matches to the unit.
The caution figures move in a way the prosecution figures do not: 28 and 27 in 2007/08 and 2008/09, then 9 the following year. The reports do not explain it.
What a complaint is not
A complaint is an allegation. The regulator’s own disposal table for 2009/10 lists 201 cases: 78 substantiated, 44 unsubstantiated, 27 about somebody it did not regulate, 19 conciliated, 16 where the investigation was suspended, eight withdrawn and the remaining nine elsewhere.
There is also no denominator here. A regulator with more advisers will receive more complaints, and the adviser headcount this regulator publishes stops in 2008 — 4,061 advisers at 31 March 2008, after 3,915 in 2007 and 3,629 in 2006. After that it reports advisers only in tables split by advice level and by fee-charging status, with no total, and since 2020/21 it gives no total at all. So the rate cannot be computed, and none is offered.
The figures
Read from the OISC and IAA annual reports for 2005/06 through 2024/25 — Table 8, 9 or 11 depending on the edition, and the running text of the later ones. Every value, with the row or sentence it came from and a link to the report, is on the reports page and the immigration advisers page.
One figure in this series has been quietly revised: 2010/11 was published as 291 complaints in 2011 and as 316 in 2013. That is a separate piece.