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The Forum of Immigration Practitioners (FIPSA) welcomes recent statements by the Department of Home Affairs regarding the elimination of the backlog related to temporary residence permits.
Our collective experience is that many permits which were submitted during 2009-2010 are unaccounted for by the department, and despite resubmission of copies together with the submission receipts, many of these permits remain ”lost”. It is estimated that at least 20 000 applications are lost or unaccounted for after these were submitted to the department over the last 18 months. There have been a number of court cases around this issue in the last few months which have been necessitated by the desperation of applicants.
We further place on record that there has been a noticeable decline in the standard of adjudication and that a high percentage of permits , 40-45% are issued with erroneous endorsements , mainly incorrect dates, incorrect workplace and in some cases permits are issued to the wrong person. This places the holder of the permit in an extremely difficult position, as they may be considered to be illegal if the status and conditions differ from the status ascertained by the department’s inspectors or police. Efforts to correct these errors take a long time and cause extreme prejudice to the applicants and their employers.
We note that there has not been a general directive or public announcement regarding the legal status of applicants who have not yet received the permits after the 30 day finalisation period which would allow them to commence the activities for which they applied for , while they await the outcome of their application. The result of this state of affairs is that many applicants have lost jobs, had bank accounts closed and have been treated as criminals due to these delays.
We call on the department to institute an audit to ascertain how many permits have been lost and/or incorrectly issued and to allow applicants the opportunity to approach the department to have their erroneously endorsed permits corrected through an expedited process.
This report was prepared by Immigration Practitioners’ Forum of SA
http://www.moneyweb.co.za/mw/view/mw/en/page295023?oid=534512&sn=2009+Detail&pid=287226
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