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Sponsorship transfer procedure simplified

Tarek bin Deemas, head of the ministry's Employment Licensing Department, said that as part of the ministry's efforts to streamline its work and simplify procedures, it had modified a few months ago the work permit form, allowing companies and applicants to use the same application form for three purposes - recruitment of workers from foreign countries; local recruitment, which replaced the term sponsorship transfer; and recruitment of women on the sponsorship of their husband or father.

"Now all applications for sponsorship transfer for categories of employees allowed to change their visas without cancellation upon changing jobs are being filed as internal or local work permit application which has to be filed on the same form as that for employment visa," Mr Bin Deemas said, adding that a circular to this effect had been issued by Dr Khalid Al Khazraji, Under-Secretary of the Ministry for Labour Affairs.

"The circular facilitates the processing of sponsorship transfer applications. Earlier, all these applications had to be handled by a special committee, but I suggested to further streamline the process by giving the heads of the departments concerned authority to decide on the application," Mr Bin Deemas told Khaleej Times.

Elaborating, he said that under the new procedure, applications concerning transfer of job of an employee from one company to another sponsored by the same employer, there was no need to delay the processing of application by transferring it to the committee.

"Such a transaction should be signed and approved by the head of the employment licensing department or the director of the labour office."

He said the decision had been taken at a recent meeting Dr Al Khazraji held with heads of departments and labour offices, during which the under-secretary evaluated the performance of labour offices in various emirates and discussed the problems they faced as well as reasons for the delay in processing transactions in some cases.

"There was a general satisfaction with the performance of the labour offices in the light of the statistical reports submitted to the under-secretary," Mr Bin Deemas said, adding that Dubai office ranked the best in terms of efficiency and the record time it took in processing applications considering the big number of applications filed in this office.

He said that last month the number of labour card applications filed throughout the country totalled 58,554 of which 53,505 were processed; while 20,700 work permit applications were filed of which 19,304 were processed, the Dubai share of these work permit applications was 10,278 while its share of processed labour card applications was 27,988.

In January, the ministry's labour offices across the country received 68,402 applications for labour cards and processed 66,491.

Besides, 22,730 work permit applications were processed out of 24,184, of which 11,500 were processed in Dubai alone.

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