Home Affairs Minister Sen. David Burch has shown once again that he is nothing if not decisive.

By deciding to return the 4,000 incomplete work permit applications lying around the Department of Immigration he is certainly setting a high bar for employers, and that's no bad thing. Immigration officers should not be wasting their time chasing up missing documents when they could be processing the applications that have been properly filled out.

The phenomenal size of the backlog also begs the question of how this situation was allowed to spiral out of control.

But that's not the whole story. Any employer can tell of applications and documents that were sent to the department only to never be received, to have gone missing or to be delayed while further information which the employer was not originally asked for is sought.

To be sure, some of these stories may be fabricated or exaggerated, but there is enough of a critical mass to suggest that the department is not blameless in this mess. Sen. Burch went some way to admitting that when he revealed in the Senate on Monday that: "Immigration is broken, particularly in the area of work permit processing and we are going to fix it."

He said the system the department used was a 1980s model trying to cope with 2008 demand. Now $1.7 million worth of computer systems will be put in place to bring the department up to date. That's good news. Sen. Burch is also right to say that the Department cannot wait for the systems to be put in place to fix the "broken system".

And he was also brutally honest about the failure of the well intentioned "fast track" system of work permit processing which was designed to speed up the permit process but has in fact caused more delay. Why? Because everyone and their mother now applies for a fast track permit, knowing full well that a regular permit will take months to be approved. As a result, Immigration must now process two or more permit applications where only one is needed.

So Sen. Burch, please fix the system, but don't lay all the responsibility at the feet of employers. There's more than enough blame to go around.