By NATARIO McKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

THE Immigration Department has reduced average work permit processing times by 50 per cent, the minister responsible said yesterday, telling Tribune Business that while the Government will be stricter than its predecessor in granting approvals it had “no intention of crippling the business community”.

Fred Mitchell, minister of foreign affairs and immigration, said his ministry has tried to give priority to industries such as construction and financial services, while acknowledging that there were still a number of cases where businesses were unhappy at the speed with which work permits were being processed.

“When the Chamber of Commerce had raised the issue, I think the lag time was about three months on average when I looked at the applications,” Mr Mitchell said.

“Just looking at the ones we dealt with this morning, most of them came in at the middle of August; that makes it about six weeks.

“That’s about cutting it in half, but the difficulty is that you will still find a number of cases where people are unhappy with the speed at which it is being processed. You can still run into one or two people who will say: ‘I had an application in from last year’, or ‘I haven’t heard anything in 12 months’. That still happens, but hopefully that’s the exception and not the rule.”

   Mr Mitchell explained that that there were two aspects to the delay, one being physical processes and the other adjudication procedures.

”There are two aspects of the delay as I see it,” he added.”One is the physical side, that is the software and hardware infrastructure. You bring in the applications and then it has to be scanned; there are some challenges with the scanning, for instance.

“The other is the adjudication side, which is the legal or regulatory side, and there are various things that have to be provided before a decision can be made. Often times, people don’t have the material in, or if they do it’s incomplete.

“You may require advertising, there’s a labour certificate which is required, all of which requires additional time on the adjudication process. It may have to be referred to a professional body, and that might add some time to it, but we try to give priorities to areas like construction, financial services, the airport project and those sorts of areas,” Mr Mitchell said.

“I have someone trouble shooting to see what we can do to improve those processes. For example, we have applications for various professions: engineers, accountants and architects.

“What I have implemented since I became minister is that the professional associations connected to these professions should register that they have no objection before we ourselves commit to the work permit.”

Mr Mitchell said it was his hope that the work permit approval process would take 21 days - the filing of a properly completed application to response. He was unable to put a number on the amount of applications that had been processed since the Government took office, but estimated that they were well into the hundreds.

  “What I explained to one of the companies that came to see me this morning is the regulatory atmosphere with regard to work permits has change since the Government changed,” Mr Mitchell said.

“The Government is trying to be more sensitive to what we perceive as a demand in the population to protect jobs for Bahamians.

“You will find that the regime will be more strict, but at the same time we have no intention of crippling the business community, and so anyone who has a particular case, there is an appeals procedure and we try to resolve whatever difficulties anyone has within a short space of time.”

  The Department of Immigration plans to invest some $250,000 into a new computer programme designed to speed up the work permit application process.

“The IT department is putting some preliminary designs to us on moving the processes on-line, and I saw some specs this morning. There is an internal committee at the Immigration Department that is looking at this, so I expect to have some progress within a month or so on what we have to do,” Mr Mitchell said.