AIMA takes over SEF

Residencies & citizenships Portugal Golden Visa đŸ‡”đŸ‡č
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I filed my case when it was clear applications filed at the same time as mine had progressed much further than mine (and in some cases had cards issued before I was even pre-approved) rather than I had a specific loss. I had tried other avenues such as emails, calls & visits to SEF to no avail. The situation seemed unfair and I prefer to be active in a process than passive.

I take the opposite view on this - if there are two applications for citizenship waiting to be processed, which do you choose a) the one who knows his rights and will take action if you delay or b) the one which can wait because the applicant doesn’t even care to complain ?
Or more likely the government won’t even know or care what happened 5 years earlier when you applied for a visa.

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I do not think this should be something that concerns you. As far as I know, Portugal’s legal system is Nepolionic rather than Common law (which is found in English-speaking countries) and laws are codified and defined exactly rather than based on precedent and interpretation. This is why each AIMA summons is evaluated individually by a judge rather than simply referring to precedent and saying here’s another one of the same outrages at our failing immigration service. In this respect, the citizenship application is a process of compiling rigorous documentation that ticks the required boxes.

I also agree that nobody will remember the summons in five years time and it is in any case a completely different government department that deals with citizenship than with GVs. I believe that AIMA will have a role in producing one of the pieces of documentation that attests how long you’ve been resident according to the rules. If they delay in this then nothing stops another summons to compel them to produce it and proving hardship in this case would be quite trivial.

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Thanks for the feedback, all. I’m also beginning to think January 2025 is an unrealistic goal for biometrics, though it’ll have been over two years since we submitted our applications. We may consider proceeding with a lawsuit, as we’re–like everyone else–flabbergasted by the glacial pace. It just shouldn’t take this long.

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Does anyone have any information that the existing Residence Visa extension to June 30 would be extended? Given that there are still 300,000 to 400,000 applications still pending?

My visa is long expired but don’t want to pursue the time, energy, cost of a legal action unless I run out of all other options.

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It is indeed 400.000 pending cases

Now the government starts wondering about the role of Aima. They created it 6 months ago and now they are wondering :joy::raised_hands:.

Maybe in next 6 months, they will be discussing to reserve Aima to Sef.

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What was the population of Brazil? I guess we can accept it as theoretical limit for pending case :slight_smile:

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The problem here I think is that at some point the problem just becomes too big. Processing 400,000 applications? We’re talking about a set of institutions that at best had to deal with low-5-figures a year not all so long ago. Now it’s some steady stream of low-5-figures a month probably, without even dealing with the backlog. The organization required to handle that kind of load is fundamentally different than the one you had.

I’ve experienced this personally from the inside, even, recently; the company I work for went from 100 employees to 400 in the space of under three years after a decade and change of being around 100 and we quintupled in volume. Pure bedlam. I’d say we’ve gotten near breaking, we’ve had multiple leadership changes in the process as well as a lot of the original employees simply leaving, unable or unwilling to cope. This isn’t a unique phenomenon. And we’re a company that pours cash and can afford to hire all the staff we need and pay for mistakes.

AIMA as a government agency is hamstrung by all of the things that hamstring governments - what’s the odds their budget has increased significantly? Versus just a bunch of shuffling of deck chairs on the Titanic? How hard is it to post postings and hire into them? Not to mention that some non-zero percentage of their employees probably wish all of these immigrants would simply go the hell away.

You can say “but they’ve had two years!!” Yes, probably two years of

  • wondering if this will last or not, so how much effort do we spend on it
  • trying this or that small change thinking that’ll help
  • some sort of major change that you think will help then fails
  • some sort of massive leadership change that maybe actually helps but initially causes yet more chaos

All this stuff takes time to play out.

Eventually, if you push an organization too far, it simply breaks down and ceases to function.

Sometimes, that’s the only answer. You have to simply stop everything and re-organize and re-build and create some sort of structure that can keep up. It takes a lot of institutional courage to do that, and most organizations only do it when everything is already collapsing, after you’ve had multiple leadership changes and multiple attempts to do everything to stave that off, because that’s human nature. Consider Boeing. Or Intel. Intel took forever to realize how badly they’d screwed up and finally re-hire Gelsinger. Gelsinger’s been striving mightily to turn the Titanic but it’s going to be years yet. Boeing’s still barely discovering how bad it really is, after years of bodging while hoping they could keep getting away with some cosmetic quick fixes so they could keep feeding all that spare cash to shareholders.

Not saying anyone has to like this, or even sit down and take it. I expect most here won’t. Just saying that these processes tend to have their own logic and momentum and tend to get worse before they get better. You can get upset about promises made all you want but it doesn’t help. Boeing promised to make safe planes. Those promises are broken now and all the complaining in the world does not un-break those promises. You end up like United and simply doing the best you can with the situation you’ve been handed - cancelling your MAX orders and finding Airbuses where you can and planning to extend the life of the planes you have and backing out of your growth plans because they’re simply unsustainable. (I have to give Scott Kirby that. He bit the bullet and did what he had to for the good of the company, whatever the impact on his plans and stock price.) Or in the case of people here, starting lawsuits or dumping investments or changing destinations or whatever.

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Whatever might happen next, I still believe AIMA can issue cards for 400k Ukrainians and Syriens within 1 month if Portugal has that many refugees.

In the past, SEF gave cards to over 50k Ukrainians within weeks. I’ve never seen any Ukrainian waiting for cards like investors. Therefore, I believe in their capacity to issue cards. I hate over-estimate things. But their capacity is always there and 100% ready. However, willingness to issue the card is a different matter and most likely they are not willing to solve it. The clear example of their unwillingness is that they stopped the automatic renewal in which in my opinion it could easily solve 100k-200k pending cases.

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Disagree.

You can do anything - once. In the IT world, it’s called “technical debt”. You manage some massive effort
 by doing a half-ass job, or straining to the utmost limit, or saying “yeah I’ll issue all the cards but then do all the actual data entry and behind the scenes work later”. You’ve done what was asked, at the cost of saving up a whole steaming pile of shit that’s gotta be flushed eventually
 and because you half-assed it, it will take 2x as long to fix as if you’d done it right in the first place.

You can keep doing it, but again at some point there’s no more room in the back to store all the shit and you simply drown.

Also dealing with that now personally.

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Did you mean thousands?

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No, we’re a small company. Quadrupling employees is hard at any level.

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@jb4422 has an interesting take on this situation and one that is probably more accurate than not.

You can see glimmers of effort to resolve this problem through the anecdotal reports from immigrants.

For example,
-few at AIMA knows how to operate the computer system. I’ve heard reports of AIMA staff cancelling appointments because they don’t understand how to use the computer. This is not surprising. You have what is probably a complex UI and an even more complex backend that was patched together over 5-10 years by SEF and there was a small IT staff that knew how to keep it running. You can see this on the front end web site for ari.sef.pt. The website isn’t terrible but it isn’t modern either. It is functional, but just barely. When the people who knew the system were booted out, the dominos fell.

-In January AIMA tried to open renewals but failed due to improper database configuration. ARIs were accidentally opened for renewal with incorrect attributes. To Jeff’s point, this probably created weeks or months of work to fix the problem on the backend further straining morale and resolve.

-AIMA has hinted several times that they are working on a new IT system to solve these problems. I can say from personal experience, this is not always easy to implement even if you have a dream team of developers. Sometimes the specs are mis-communicated to the developers so they end up creating something that doesn’t actually solve the problem. And let’s be realistic, there are many reports of “brain drain” of top IT talent from Portugal.

-In desperation, AIMA pitched a “hail mary” to hire lawyers to take care of the backlog. But this presents problems also. Who is going to train the lawyers? Can corruption creep into the process through this backdoor? What safeguards need to be added? And what is the method for the lawyers to interface with the AIMA technical systems. So many new problems and issues created by this proposed solution.

-And dont forget that when renewal opened in NOvember, the DUC payments were “lost” in the system and required manually matching up bank entries to the corresponding applicants. This takes a lot of manpower and shows that the SEF systems went backwards once the people who knew how to operate them left.

Don’t get me wrong, I am sympathetic to AIMA staff. They need a bigger budget and more resources. I think they should pay them a commission for each application processed, and see how quickly the backlog disappears.

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“In the past SEF gave cards to 50k Ukrainians within weeks”

Call an amnesty then, and issue cards to all GV applicants, and start afresh. Wipe the slate.

Come renewals, look at the applicants more closely.

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I think us IT folk who’ve been through plenty of re-orgs viewed the initial “mega operation” and “new systems in months” claims as fantasy (I did). Add in changing governments and policies - even a functioning and agile organisation would have trouble coping.

Consider that in 2020, Portugal got approval for just shy of 10 million euros in free money from the EU to implement its new “smart borders” system. “When SEF was officially abolished in October 2023, the European funding for ETIAS and SES had not been executed and nothing had progressed in the development of the systems.” So now not only does PT have to give the EU’s gift back, in February '24 the outgoing Costa government authorised 25 million euros for “expenditure on the acquisition of hardware and software necessary for the implementation of the Smart Borders project.”

Care to wager how well AIMA’s new systems projects are going? :thinking:

@Garbonzo - adding to your point above about AIMA hiring lawyers to help with the backlog
 even if said lawyers manage to extract enough useful data from AIMA (?) to vet and approve an application, is AIMA currently capable of moving their approval to its next stages? This is the AIMA that can’t even manage renewals of people its predecessor SEF approved.

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The so called “technical debt” the the IR world that you mentioned never happened when they issued cards to the Ukrainians and Syrians. If the war continues to get worst and another 100k Ukrainians come to Portugal, I am sure that all of them get cards within 1-2 weeks after their arrivals. SEF did a fantastic job for the 50k Ukrainians before. There is no reason for me to distrust them if another 100k Ukrainians come. It is even more absurd to see that the immigrants with job contracts and paying taxes here could not renew their cards for years but the strangers from nowhere were brought into the country and were handed the cards within 1 week.

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I used to live in the Dulles corridor back in the 90s. I recall one weekend, they managed to repave near the entire damn thing in one go. Friday it’s a construction zone, next Monday it’s miles of beautiful clean pavement. It was wonderful. It also took years and years of planning.

I wonder how many people wondered afterwards “well if they could do this so fast, why can’t they just repave all the roads over the weekend?”.

You don’t know that the debt didn’t happen. Technical debt is the stuff that piles up that no one sees. They did what was required - issuing 50k cards - but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a whole pile of “things that should have been done in the process” that got shoved onto the backlog, and it almost certainly meant a bunch of other BAU stuff that didn’t get done because Someone On High said “DO THIS NOW” without caring about any of the other stuff. That’s how tech debt happens.

Someone could of course come along and say “well do it again”. If you keep doing that though, eventually something simply shatters and falls apart. Like, say, AIMA now not being able to issue any renewals whatsoever. Maybe they literally can’t.

The equivalent is your spouse throwing so many things on the honey-do list and reprioritizing it all the time so you never even manage to get started on project A before you’re dragged off to project C so you can get dragged to F and pretty soon your workshop is so filled with half-done projects you can’t even move and meanwhile the house is falling down and you throw up your hands in frustration and file for divorce. Now imagine you’re polygamous and have 10 wives all throwing stuff on the honey-do list, and now they’re all not only yelling more demands at you they’re all fighting with each other for whose stuff should be top of the list.

It’s great that Philly could rebuild the burnt I-95 overpass so fast. I’m sure they did a slapdash job that will fall apart in 3 years and 15 other projects got disrupted because they had to drag all the contractors off other jobs to do this and snarled all their supply lines stealing whatever they could grab to fix it. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t necessary, but TANSTAAFL.

Frankly, I think a lot of stuff in the world is playing out this way as of late.

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The “technical debt” you’ve referred to is a “real debt” which the system’s capacity is outplayed. However, in SEF’s case, there is nothing called “technical debt”. The “debt” in SEF system (i.e pending cases) are due to the fact that they do not want to solve it. Their current system is 100% capable of solving it but they do not want to do it and steer the problem to the so called “technical IT” problem. To me, it is 100% bullcr@p. What’s wrong with letting the applicants giving the Biometrics in their home countries’s embassies? Why not keeping the automatic renewal? Why don’t they allow people choosing their own biometric dates rather than forcing people to attend the fixed dates? why not stop the GV now to clear the backlogs of GVs because there are already thousand of GVs pending cases and they are still letting people applying for it and they complain about rich investors and their IT system? Do they actually work at all? I doubt not. Statistically, there are about 1300-1400 GV applications per year. That means each month they have 110 applications of GV. There are 6 branches of SEF/AIMA that are in charge of GV (Lisbon Porto Faro Coimbra Madeira Azores). It means each branch has about less than 20 applications per month which is less than 1 application per day. But somehow still choking like a baby eating raw fish. When I connect all the dots, it only makes sense to me that they do not want to make things quick and just leave our application on the desk. Officers work and follow the order of the their managers. Their managers have to follow orders from higher levels. That leads to the point that Portugal wants to keep the money of the investors in the country as long as possible. They are afraid of losing all the capitals and of course they have to use IT’s issue as a reason to avoid telling the truth. Truth is brutal but that is what we have to face!

PS: to give you a clearer information: I am non- UK non US. I had to give my biometric at the embassy to apply for a Schengen Visa. That means I gave my biometric at the embassy to go to SEF in Portugal to re-do my biometric


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I say “technical debt” as a general term; it does not have to refer to IT/technology. You can have technical debt in purely paper or process. And quite often even in technology companies the “technical debt” is one of paper and process and management. People are invariably the biggest problem.

“why not”? I do not know. I can think of quite viable answers to all your points based on the application of Hanlon’s razor and Murphy’s law and queueing theory which lead to a very different conclusion than yours, but I am not employed there and cannot speak to the actual situation so I shall not try. I merely meant to offer a viewpoint of how these kinds of processes happen and break down based on my own experiences. We clearly disagree, which is fine.

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Another way to look at it is this: whatever the backlog of all outstanding immigration cases is, we few GV applicants are probably the only ones with the cash to file a summons to expedite whatever stage we are at so we do have an advantage built into the system.

Of course this shouldn’t be necessary. Somebody here helpfully calculated that each of the six AIMA offices only needs to process around one GV application a day based on historical volumes. This means around 20 GVs processed a month representing 20 x €6000 = €120,000 income for the office. Let’s assume that processing each application takes one person a day’s work. I don’t know what the salary is for an AIMA employee but let’s guess it’s around €5000 a month to make the argument. That’s a pretty good margin for AIMA from GV applicants and in fact we could argue we’re paying for 24 AIMA employees and not just the one who’s processing our application. Why are they not keen to ensure that revenue stream keeps flowing or even increases by accelerating the processing of GV applications? Does the government finance office that manages budgets not have a say in any of this?

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Of course not. That’s another department. Nothing ever works that way in any government that I’m aware of. Just because the OMB says it would be better if we did X, doesn’t mean anyone else actually does it. It’s Congress that defines the budgets for the departments. Once you get a budget, you get to spend it. How you spend it is your problem. But you don’t get any more money than that. (Except in the case of civil asset forfeiture where there is an explicit hook for how the revenue flows back into the department.) How much revenue you generate is something you maybe pencil in on your budget justification for next year. Surely you did not think that the revenue from GV is somehow counted to the credit of AIMA? Or just because they went and processed 1000 applications and brought in X revenue that that would be added to their budget such that it could be used for hiring? No, the budget comes from the annual budget process. And certainly no one’s going to get a raise for it. It simply doesn’t work that way. That’s what the government pay scales are for. Your position is a GS-7 or GS-14, that’s what you get paid. I can’t imagine Portugal works any differently.

It’s nice to say it should be that, or that it’d be better if, but government does not work like business and the laws and regulations keep it so. If you want it different, then the laws and regulations have to change.

You could look at it another way. Consider the 400,000 applications. Let’s say 200,000 are for people who are coming to work. That’s 200,000 employees added to the economy. Say EUR 10,000 / yr for each. So, EUR 2bn in gross income. What’s the tax take on that, keeping in mind both the income tax and social security contributions? Not to mention the large number of business leaders in the tourism industry clamoring for workers to their politicians, versus a handful of lawyers advocating for GV and a ton of negative publicity around GV?

I tend to think that in the grander picture, GV is basically a minor annoyance to everyone.

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