The government has been forced to withdraw recent changes to its UK visa rules and revert back to those of 2010 due to errors.
Data for 2011 covering the minimum salaries that must be paid to overseas workers on UK visas was published last week. However, it was pulled earlier this week after errors in the UK Border Agency's (UKBA) code of practice were discovered.
The changes had bought good news for people with UK visas applying for jobs, with a number of employment areas seeing minimum salaries for overseas workers increase.
Indeed, Computer Weekly reported that many people in the IT sector welcomed the surprising news that offshore IT workers would see their minimum wages rise. For an IT or IS director, wages were set to rise from a minimum of £83,200 a year for a UK visa holder in 2010, to £92,628 in 2011; a pay rise of around 11 per cent.
Computer services managers also saw their minimum offshore salaries rise from £43,000 to £53,516.
Now that the data has been withdrawn, some people in the IT sector are concerned that the salary figures may have been the errors identified by the UKBA.
In response to enquiries from Computer Weekly, Steve Lamb, regional operations manager at the UKBA, said: "We have been alerted to errors in two of the recently published Codes of Practice and these are now being corrected. In the meantime, the previous codes have been reinstated onto our website."