30 September 2016
Interministerial circular n°. 2777 of 14/07/2016 (*) is the long-awaited result of the need – voiced by several users on many occasions – to standardize the documentation requested by the Sportelli Unici (one-stop shops) in Italian prefectures.
Although a generally shared approach was followed, each Prefecture (and each Territorial Office) used to ask for different documents for the same type of Nulla Osta (Work Permit), according to the criteria that were considered most effective in proving the requirements to be met.
Therefore, operationally speaking, the procedure involved applying every time to each Sportello Unico for a full, updated list of the documents to submit, before collecting the data.
Hence, in theory, regularizing the requests is an excellent project, which should put an end to differences between the Provinces, thereby simplifying the relatively extremely complex immigration paperwork.
However, in practice, the contents of the Circular simplify and explain the issue only partially: generally speaking, the amount of documents to submit is even larger than that previously requested by some one-stop shops.
Furthermore, some specifications clearly contradict current international regulations: this is the case, for example, with the Certificate of Social Security Coverage mentioned for relocation under art. 27 A of the Consolidation Act. According to the recent circular, documents must necessarily be translated and legalized by the authorities that have jurisdiction in the countries where they are issued; on the contrary, the Bilateral Agreement between Brazil and Italy specifies, for example, that documents do not have to be translated and legalized.
In other circumstances, as before, legalized documents are requested when legalization is not technically feasible – for example, when documents do not contain official signatures (pay packets, company balance sheets, public company documents etc).
Finally, sometimes the authorities in charge of requesting the “new” documentation proved, to all intents and purposes, not to be ready to check the incoming documentation, since they had no experience in the matter and had not been briefed before the Circular became effective.
Therefore, in the light of the facts, in this transition period, it is still useful – or at least advisable – to contact the relevant single-stop shops and territorial offices anyway, to be informed about when exactly the Circular is going to be implemented, if it is going to be also applied to the Applications that will have been submitted before its coming into force, and, finally, how the conflicting requests made by the two Ministries should be interpreted.
Meanwhile, it will take time to simplify and standardize immigration bureaucracy, with a view to making it really effective. As usual, Professional Relo will keep monitoring the situation.
(*) Titolo completo Circolare: Procedimenti di competenza degli Sportelli Unici per l’Immigrazione – Documentazione occorrente ai fini dell’ingresso, al di fuori delle quote, dei lavoratori che rientrano nelle ipotesi disciplinate dagli articoli 27, co. 1 e 27-quater del D.Lgs. 286/98.
