Dominica age-16 interview is the topic clients ask about most in my LA home as of May 2026. Since July 2024, Dominica's Citizenship by Investment Unit has required every applicant 16 and older to sit a due diligence interview. Twenty-two months in, I still get LA calls from Chinese clients whose agents told them the interview is optional, can be skipped over Zoom, or doesn't apply to the kids studying abroad. None of that has been true since mid-2024. Time to lay it out.
The interview itself has three accepted formats as of May 2026: in-person at Roseau, in-person at the Dominica authorised office in Dubai or London, or Zoom with a CIU officer. Zoom is what most mainland Chinese applicants use. Zoom does not mean a soft pass. The officer asks the applicant to present the original passport on camera, sign a declaration with a wet signature, and answer twelve to eighteen questions covering source of funds, family relationships, business background, and motivation. Sessions run 35 to 55 minutes. Inconsistent answers, blank stares on basic facts, or visible dodging on specific numbers all get flagged into the file and trigger heavier EDD review downstream.
The Dominica due diligence pipeline today is a four-tier check: tier one is document KYC, tier two is third-party EDD database scans (sanctions lists, CRS data exchange, PEP relationships), tier three is the mandatory interview, tier four is a horizontal cross-check against the shared database the five Caribbean CBI countries now jointly maintain. End to end, this takes 7 to 9 months from contract signing to approval. Any agent still quoting 4 months is selling 2022 data. Clients who sign on that assumption show up to the interview unprepared and have to rebuild the file.
The three interview scenarios that block Chinese families
The first one is adult unmarried children between 18 and 25 added as dependents. Chinese families pull these dependents in by default, and these dependents are the most likely to flunk source-of-funds questions. The officer asks who pays the tuition, whether the child has seen the family bank statements, why the parents want the passport. A 21-year-old who has been overseas at university for three years usually has no clue about household finances. My pre-interview protocol for these dependents is a four-week briefing where the child sits down with the family's source-of-funds slide deck, walks through the business history with the main applicant, and rehearses the basic facts. Most agents do not do this.
The second scenario is parents aged 55 to 70 added as dependents. Dominica tightened parent-dependent verification in 2025. The officer covers two things in the interview: the parent's actual living situation with the main applicant over the past 12 months (shared address, visit frequency, financial dependency evidence), and the parent's own source of funds (pension records, prior employment history, real estate history). One client I sat with in my LA home last year had his father, a retired state-owned-enterprise technician in central China, asked by the officer why a 65-year-old on a 4,500 RMB monthly pension had 800,000 RMB in a current account. That is not harassment, that is a standard CIU question. The client could not answer it, and we spent three months supplementing documentation.
The third scenario is when the main applicant is the controlling owner of a company but the ownership chain goes through 2 or 3 intermediate entities. Cross-border traders and early-stage Web3 operators see this most often. The officer asks about ultimate equity share, who is the bank signatory at the operating company, and the applicant's tax filing record for the past three years. Layered structure is fine on its own. Inability to articulate each layer is the actual problem. We prepare these clients by drawing the ownership chain on one A4 sheet, listing each layer's jurisdiction and compliance status, and rehearsing the client to walk through it in 90 seconds without notes. That mastery is what the officer is really measuring.
The Ken rule: not the most expensive, not the cheapest, only the right fit. Dominica's $200,000 EDF entry stays the lowest in the Caribbean five, but a low entry price combined with a 7 to 9 month real timeline and a mandatory interview means the quality of upfront preparation determines whether the file gets approved. I have seen too many clients in my LA home holding 4-month contracts from agents and panicking when the interview notice lands. WhatsApp +15595666666, send a message with the word 'Dominica interview'. I have compiled the interview question patterns from the past 18 months of Dominica cases I've worked on. Based on your family structure, industry, and source of funds, you get a tailored prep checklist. Eleven years California licensed, this kind of operational playbook is not something most consultancies hand out for free.
