Australia’s attempt to create an automated visa system is costing more money, but may not be moving closer to completion. 

The Morrison Government earlier this year revived a previously abandoned plan to outsource upgrades to its visa processing system. It took on a private supplier to deliver a one-stop shop for visa processing by the end of this year.

The plan is to digitise incoming passenger cards and create an online visa processing portal.

The earlier, dumped version of the plan would have seen the winning supplier paid a cut of each visa application processed, potentially generating hundreds of millions in revenue.

For the second attempt at the system, Pragma Partners received $6.5 million for service design and analytic services while KPMG received $3 million for delivering a business case. 

But in May this year, the Department of Home Affairs said it paused the program, pending government decisions on opening the country's borders in post-COVID-19.

“We're grappling with the jigsaw puzzle of how does one - as you open a border at scale and the government's budget and planning assumption is that that will not occur before the middle of next year - how do you ensure that you've got a robust digital signature of someone's health status before they get on the plane?” Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo said in May.

“The challenge here, and it'll take the best part of six to 12 months as I said in my opening statement and the government's made no final decisions about what its requirements are going to be based on health advice, is how do you securely, proportionately and with privacy ingest health data before travel occurs?”

This week, Labor's spokesperson for immigration Andrew Giles said the government's second attempt at creating the system has already cost an extra $12.7 million in “wasted” taxpayer dollars.

“There has been zero transparency and accountability,” he told reporters.