Many appointments are not kept and people are forced to reschedule. “It affects everything that involves issuing residence permits. Concessions, renewals. Everything that involves printing and issuing a document is congested, it is limited”, warns the union
“There have been difficulties in terms of IT application. The service capacity has been very limited because of this”, admits to CNN Portugal Artur Jorge Girão, the president of SINSEF, the union of SEF employees. About a month before the official closure of the Foreigners and Borders Service and the takeover of the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA), the number of pending issues continues to increase. The SEF itself admits the existence of "constraints".
For at least “two weeks” the computer system has been having problems, a fact that “has had an impact on service”. Many appointments are not kept and people are forced to reschedule. “It affects everything that involves issuing residence permits. Concessions, renewals. Everything that involves printing and issuing a document is congested, limited”, says Artur Girão.
“Our computer application is already over ten years old. At a time when information technology advances every six months, perhaps it is already outdated. There has to be an investment in the future, in terms of technology, because if not, pending issues will not be recovered, this will not be caught up”, warns the union leader.
Despite not being a computer expert, he admits that the explanations they give him are valid: “The truth is that it is slow and, sometimes, even stops. So this takes away capacity. The rest is talk, it takes away capacity. And you can’t.” It cannot, because backlogs continue to increase and thousands of processes are delayed.
The SEF IT unit is already aware of the problems and will be trying to resolve the matter, but until now the embarrassment remains. “The limitations of the computer system” were known. Artur Girão even admits that he believes that “the system should not work for a long time”, but it is not “informatic” and cannot “technically discuss these issues”.