Raffaele Angius is a Senior Adviser at the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI), where he has worked since 2008 and served in many different roles. He is currently Product Manager for the Biometrics, Identity and Personal Data development team and member of UDI’s Identity expert team.

During the past two years he has been Product Manager for ModPerson, a digital transformation project and the first step in the restructuring of the Norwegian foreign-national database from a monolithic to a domain-based architecture. This is a joint programme of the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration, the Norwegian Police Service, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Immigration Appeals Board and the Norwegian Tax Administration.

The current leg of the programme is centred on the domains of personal data and identity, with two main deliverables. The new solution for managing personal data will increase data quality, improve cross-authority information sharing and empower automation. The system for identity management and assessment will ensure consistency in the collection and assessment of ID data, provide process support for the assessment of identity information and ultimately lead to a greatly improved workflow for identity control.

The Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI) is the central agency in the Norwegian immigration administration. UDI implements and helps to develop the government’s immigration and refugee policy. UDI is tasked with facilitating lawful and desirable immigration and ensuring that those who meet the requirements are given an opportunity to come to Norway. At the same time, however, our role is to check the validity of information provided in immigration/asylum cases and we are tasked with preventing abuse of the system. We process applications for protection (asylum), visitor visas, family immigration, residence permits for work and study purposes, citizenship, permanent residence permits and travel documents. We also make decisions on rejection and expulsion. UDI considers the cases that the Foreign Service and the police are not authorised to decide and cases where it is uncertain whether a residence permit should be granted. As the superior expert body, UDI instructs the police and foreign service missions in immigration cases. In addition, we are responsible for ensuring that all asylum seekers are offered somewhere to stay while waiting for us to process their applications and for finding good solutions for those who wish to return to their home countries.