Multinationals 'irate' four-month delay for work and residence permits
Multinationals are being forced to wait up to four months to get work permits for staff arriving from abroad to work in Ireland.
Long delays in the processing of residency permits has left some employees in a state of panic, it has been claimed.
Frank Morley, managing director of Corporate Care Relocation, which has offices in Dublin and Cork, said anyone seeking permits which allow people from outside the EEA (European Economic Area) to live and work in Ireland faces major challenges.
Some companies apply for employee work permits through the Trusted Partner Register, set up some years ago to ensure documentation was processed within two weeks.
However, this is taking up to six weeks, said Mr Morley, who added that companies that applied for work permits in the traditional way were having to wait for up to four months.
“A US multinational based in Ireland cannot grasp this,” he said.
“We’re dealing every day with multinationals who are irate at the long delays experienced with both the normal application process and the Trusted Partner Registration system.”
Meanwhile, people entering the State from non-EEA countries to live and work, and who must secure special residency permits within 90 days of entering the country, were also encountering huge delays, said Mr Morley.
The greatest number of residency permits are processed in the Dublin area, where applicants must go online and make a mandatory appointment with the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Services office.
“The problem is that in most cases, people are unable to get an appointment within the 90 day period,” said Mr Morley.
The system has been under huge pressure as a result of the block-booking of appointments from outside the state.
“We’re aware this is being dealt with but there’s a huge backlog currently,” said Mr Morley.
“Since June 2018, we’ve had a major issue trying to get appointments so that our clients can secure their residency permits.”
“People are panicking. The vast majority of people want to comply with the system but the stress this is causing is huge.”
The delays were affecting everyone from high-ranking executives such as CEOs and managing directors to graduates arriving to take up a job, said Mr Morley.
The Department of Business Enterprise and Innovation said it had experienced “a high volume of employment permit applications in recent months, which has led to some delays in processing applications”.
At the end of October, the total number of employment permit applications was up 28% over the same period in 2017.
A statement said the department’s employment permits section was working to reduce the waiting times to five weeks for trusted partners, down from seven weeks, and to 13 weeks for standard applications, down from 16 weeks, and had introduced changes including additional staffing resources to reduce processing times.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Department of Justice said a system to counteract the abuse of the system by ‘bots’ had prevented the block booking of appointments by third-party agents.
A number of measures had also been taken to increase the capacity of the office, including assigning additional staff to the registration office, overtime provision, and weekend openings.
