Interior Blamed For Slow Processing Of Transactions

KUWAIT CITY, Dec 12: The Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor will temporarily halt the transfer and issuance of work permits and all other transactions related to expatriate workers from Dec 26th for a period of 2-5 days.

However, it will renew residence permits and cancel work permits during the period to facilitate the travel of expatriates wanting to leave the country, Al-Watan Arabic daily quoted Undersecretary Mohammed Al-Kandari as saying.

He added that the ministry will conduct its annual inventory and prepare statistics related to work permits, transfers, violations and so on during the period.

Al-Kandari said this annual practice will not take more than 2-5 days this year due to implementation of automated system in all labor departments of the ministry and pointed out that the automated system made it very easy to access the required information.

The Undersecretary said the ministry also wanted to reduce the time of inventory to prevent inconvenience to expatriates, some of whom have to bear fines for violating residence laws. He called on all companies to get their employees' residence documents renewed before the last date to avoid fines and other legal actions.

Speaking of work permits issued this year, he said more work permits were issued for government contracts this year compared to the previous year "as large development projects need more workforce for execution."

For the private sector, however, the number of work permits issued has been declining steadily for the past three years. In 2007, a total of 179,000 permits were issued, while in 2008, less than 100,000 and in 2009, only 72,000 were issued, added Al-Kandari.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor blamed the Interior Ministry for slow processing of transactions related to transfer of residency status, reports Al-Rai daily.

A source disclosed that feeding data of applicants wanting to transfer from visit to work visa, domestic to family visa, as well as from private sector to government takes a minimum of 15-30 minutes.

He said employees of the Social Affairs ministry would not have been wasting so much time in each transaction, if the Immigration Department provided access to its database.

"If access is granted, Social Affairs Ministry employees would have to just key in the Civil ID number to retrieve data of the applicant and the entire transaction would be completed within a few minutes," he said and urged the Interior Ministry to provide access to relevant data.

Arab Times 2010