Emigration
Report alerts to the lack of response capacity of the Contact Center and delay in scheduling face-to-face assistance.
Almost 300,000 expressions of interest to obtain a residence permit in Portugal were pending at the SEF in January this year, taking this security service more than two years to validate these requests, revealed today the Ombudsman’s Office.
The report “Monitoring the activity and Extinction Process of the Foreigners’ Service” reports on the “high number of complaints to the ombudsman”, Maria Lúcia Amaral, about the process after the presentation of an expression of interest (IM) to obtain a residence permit (AR) in Portugal via visa-free work.
“In 2022, the trend that had been observed since 2020, for the increase in the deadline for validation/acceptance of IM for granting AR, was accentuated. Thus, while in 2020 the period will have been around eight months, in 2022 it already exceeded two years. In addition, the fact that, from the validation, it often takes three or four months to schedule a face-to-face service and almost a year until the final decision on the requests”, specifies the document.
The IM to work in Portugal, request formalized with the SEF to obtain an AR, is made through the electronic platform of the Automatic Pre-Scheduling System (SAPA).
Read more:More than 93,000 CPLP citizens obtained residence permits in Portugal in one month
The ombudsman questioned the SEF national directorate about “the worsening delay in the processing of procedures“, which “recognized the inability to deal with the high number of requests, due to lack of human resources and technological means, namely to meet the high number of IM registered monthly on the SAPA portal ”.
The report underlines that the monthly average of document validations last year was around 2,500, while the average IM presented was around 18,000, meaning that, throughout that year, the average growth in liabilities will have been over 15,000 per month.
According to the document, 30,000 new IMs have been received per month since October 2023, with IMs submitted in December 2020 being scheduled in January 2023, that is, about two years earlier.
“The increase in vacancies available for scheduling, from around 4,000 to 6,000 vacancies per month, was unable to respond to the total number of requests, accumulating, since then, approximately 24,000 MI every month”, he indicates, specifying that 289,415 MI were pending on the SAPA portal in January 2023.
“More than the exact determination of the number of MI pending on the SAPA portal — in January 2023, 289,514 MI were pending in this framework —, it is the tendency towards a significant increase in liabilities that causes serious concern”, warns the ombudsman.
Read more:Up to 14,000 euros were asked from immigrants to give them Portuguese residency
The report also underlines that, in 2021 and 2022, “only 26,738 and 26,065 cases were validated, respectively, that is, in these two years there were fewer validations than in 2020 (with 72,720 validations), given that, from 2021 to 2022, the number of those interested in RA via IM increased by more than three times ”.
The report also draws attention to the functioning of the SEF Contact Center, which cannot cope with the volume of work, and to the scheduling of face-to-face assistance, with an average foreign citizen waiting around three months.
The Ombudsman indicates that the difficulty in establishing a telephone contact with the SEF is aggravated whenever this service advertises the availability of vacancies for scheduling
“Concretely, the combination, in the same day, of the opening of 42,848 vacancies for a wide range of purposes made the normally available number of telephone lines clearly insufficient, grouped into a fixed number and a mobile number, not giving a full response to the access that was immediately attempted by all interested parties. This happened, for example, on October 14, 2022”, says the report.
