At least 230 applicants for permanent residency in the Cayman Islands sat tests that contained inaccurate or out of date questions, an open records inquiry by the Cayman Compass has revealed.
The history and culture test – a key part of the application process for people from overseas looking to remain in Cayman long term – featured several incorrect questions for a period of around six months after the 2021 general election and potentially longer.
The most obvious errors centred around the names of Cabinet ministers – which changed after the election – but were left unedited on the test.
Emailed complaints to the Workforce Opportunities and Residency Cayman, also shared with the Compass under the Freedom of Information Act, have raised further concerns about several other questions said to be incorrect or impossible to answer correctly from the multiple-choice alternatives.
The test is worth a total of up to 20 points towards the 110-point target required to get a Permanent Residency Certificate, and the errors left hundreds of decisions open to appeal.
“It means that some people will have got PR that shouldn’t have got it and some won’t have got it when they should have,” a legal source told the Compass.
WORC, which is responsible for administering the test, declined to answer follow-up questions from the Compass.
10-month FOI process
Details of the incorrect questions, and how many people sat them, were only supplied to the Compass following a Freedom of Information request, aspects of which took 10 months and an appeal to the Ombudsman to resolve.
The department, in its initial response, said “a couple of questions on the test for September 2021” were incorrect and that these had been discontinued when this was highlighted.
WORC stated in that response in July of last year that “there were no copies of any complaints from applicants” in relation to the test.
Asked if those applicants that had set tests with erroneous questions had the chance to have this remedied, WORC responded, “The test that were being used was not out of date, therefore, we did not have to offer/notify the applicants the opportunity to retake the test.”
The Compass appealed that response, sparking a nine-month process involving the Ombudsman that ultimately resulted in more detailed records being released to us in February of this year.
Those records show that there were erroneous questions, relating to the portfolios of government ministers and senior civil servants, on the test from the time of the general election on 14 April, 2021, to 24 Sept. of the same year. Some 231 applicants sat the test during that time, the response indicates.
They also indicate that WORC did receive complaints about this.
An email to the department, dated 7 Sept. 2021 – six months after the election – states, “One of my clients informs me that the Permanent Residency test questions have not been updated following the change in government earlier this year; so while he studied all of the new government officials’ details, the questions he faced during his test were still drafted around the previous government. For applicants that may be on the fringe of scoring enough points this could be a significant issue.”
WORC’s FOI response indicates the test was eventually altered to reflect the new make-up of Cabinet in mid-September.
Additional complaints
A second email, from November 2021 – after the Cabinet names had apparently been corrected – raises further concerns about multiple additional questions said to be on the test which may be out of date or inaccurate.
“It has been brought to my attention that the History and Culture questions have a number of questions which are factually wrong contained within them,” the email indicates, highlighting seven questions where the ‘correct’ answer was not an option in the multiple-choice format.
One example highlighted in the email asked the population of the Cayman Islands, offering 65,000 and 75,000 as potential answers.
According to the complaint, applicants on a University College of the Cayman Islands prep course were instructed that the ‘correct answer’ for this should be 65,000, despite Census data that shows at least 71,000 people living in the islands at that time. The latest population estimate from the Economics and Statistics Office is more than 80,000.
Another example suggested the ‘correct’ question to the industry which employed the most Caymanains – to gain a point on the test – should be ‘tourism’. The complainant suggested this was unlikely to be the case as the borders were closed at the time the test was taken. 
Other suspect questions include how many terms the premier can serve and the role of Cabinet and the director of public prosecutions.
The WORC reply to that complaint is not included in the FOI response and it is not clear if the department accepted the premise of the email or reviewed the questions.
Roy Bodden, the former president of UCCI and a former politician, said the history faculty at the college had helped write a bank of questions for the test back in 2012.
But he said officials in WORC, formerly the Immigration Department, were responsible for the political and civics questions, as well as setting the tests, deciding the questions and keeping them up to date.
“We gave them a list of history questions that could be asked and answered, but we had nothing to do with the administering of the tests,” he said.
Bodden added that his personal belief that anyone who sat tests with incorrect questions should have been given the full points, as though they had answered those question correctly.
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