MygrantPost Report By Murad Sheikh
“In 2022, the trend that had been observed since 2020, to increase the deadline for validation/acceptance of IM for granting AR, was accentuated. Thus, while in 2020 the period will have been around eight months, in 2022 it already exceeded two years. In addition, the fact that, from the validation, it often takes three or four months to schedule a face-to-face service and almost a year until the final decision on the requests”, specifies the document.
The IM to work in Portugal, request formalised with SEF to obtain an AR, is made through the electronic platform of the Automatic Pre-Scheduling System (SAPA). The report underlines that the monthly average of document validations last year was around 2,500, while the average IM presented was around 18,000, meaning that, throughout that year, the average growth in liabilities will have been over 15,000 a month. According to the document, 30,000 new IMs have been received per month since October 2023, with IMs submitted in December 2020 being scheduled in January 2023, that is, about two years earlier. The increase in vacancies available for scheduling, from around 4,000 to 6,000 vacancies per month, was unable to respond to the total number of requests, accumulating, since then, approximately 24,000 MI every month”, he indicates, specifying that they were pending 289,415 IM on the SAPA portal in January 2023.The report also underlines that, in 2021 and 2022, “only 26,738 and 26,065 cases were validated, respectively, that is, in the set of these two years there were fewer validations than in 2020 (with 72,720 validations), being certain that, from 2021 for 2022, the number of those interested in RA via IM increased more than three times.
