AIMA inherited 350,000 pending cases; began with dodgy portal
The long-awaited changeover from SEF (foreigners and borders agency) to AIMA (the agency for integration, migration and asylum) has been the shambles everyone close to the process feared it would be.
To be fair, AIMA began with over 350,000 pending cases (all of which will have been subject to the usual litany of delays and frustrations). President Luís Goes Pinheiro “recognised the need to create conditions to resolve people’s problems as quickly and effectively as possible”. Breaths were collectively held; fingers crossed …. and hopes essentially dashed: a month since AIMA came into being, and the Complaints Portal (when people can access it) has been inundated.
Communications company ‘comunicar-se.com’ has sent out a report, explaining that 207 complaints were registered between October and November – the bulk of them concerning problems with the delivery of documents (“including the loss of documents”), followed by complaints about scheduling/ difficulties in making appointments.
Then there have been “problems with paying service fees, difficulties paying DUC (Documento Único de Cobrança) and even complaints that payments made were not confirmed by the system.
Citizens describe difficulties with logging into the system, unavailability of the system and difficulty in receiving/ recovering passwords.
All in all, any notion of smooth changeover has been lost.
Says comunicar-se: “Since the beginning of the year, the number of complaints about the service (both when it was run by SEF and since) has soared 158% compared to 2022” – and one has to understand complaints in 2022 were plentiful.
Comunicar-se’s press release explains: “it should be noted that, at this time of transition, the AIMA page on the Complaints Portal still has no consumer rating, but the SEF page has a satisfaction index score of 18.7 out of 100, a response rate of 16% and a solution rate of 16.4%. These indicators reflect the organisation’s poor performance in responding to and resolving problems reported to it”.
Curiously, the minister for interior administration José Luís Carneiro who oversaw the extinction of SEF, and the consequent moving and merging of its services has been credited with success in this regard – even though the business that was ‘absorbed’ by IRN (the institute of registrars and notaries) got off to an equally unhappy start.
Mr Carneiro is currently in the running to lead his party in the next elections. If successful in both, he would be running the country.
