If you manage your organisation's Sponsor Management System (SMS), you may see one or more Borderless names on your Level 1 user list. This article explains who they are, what the statuses next to them mean, and what to do if the same name appears more than once.

When you integrate your sponsor licence with Borderless, you add us to your licence in two ways: as a Representative, so we can correspond with the Home Office on your behalf, and as a Level 1 user on your SMS, so we can carry out sponsorship work for you. That covers assigning Certificates of Sponsorship (CoS), submitting reports and changes to your licence details, and handling requests with the Home Office.

The Level 1 users we add are named members of the Borderless immigration team. You keep your own Level 1 access throughout, you can appoint as many Level 1 users as your organisation needs, and your Authorising Officer does not change.

If you want to confirm that a name on your user list belongs to the Borderless team, open the Support tab at the bottom right of your Borderless screen and ask us. We will confirm it for you.

Adding a Level 1 user is not instant. The request goes to the Home Office for assessment, and until they decide, the user sits on your list as pending. Under Manage Level 1 and 2 users you will see one of four statuses:

A request can sit at Requested for several days or longer, depending on Home Office processing times.

Sometimes the same Borderless name appears on your user list more than once, usually with a status of Requested. That happens when a request is submitted again for a user we had already requested. It is a duplicate of an existing request, not a request for an additional person.

If you see this on your licence, no extra person has been given access, no information beyond that named user's own details has been submitted, and your licence status, your CoS allocation and your own SMS access are all unaffected. Only one Borderless Level 1 user needs to be active on your licence, and only one will be.

We monitor licences with pending requests. Where more than one request for the same person is approved, we deactivate the surplus so a single active user remains. Deactivation is permanent in the SMS, so a deactivated entry cannot be switched back on.

There is nothing you need to do. If you would rather the duplicate entries were cleared sooner, contact us through the Support tab. The SMS has no option to withdraw a request that is still pending, so we would raise it with the Home Office on your behalf.

Treat any name you cannot account for seriously. Ask us to confirm it first, and if it is not ours, follow the steps in What to Do If You Suspect Your SMS Account Is Compromised. The Home Office will never ask for your SMS login details by email, and an unexpected password reset email should be treated as suspicious. Phishing emails impersonating the Home Office or UKVI covers how to spot them.

For the Home Office's own guidance on managing SMS user access, see Introduction to the sponsorship management system: SMS guide 1 on GOV.UK.