Failing to sufficiently increase staffing in response to recent mass immigration has left Poland’s public administration “unable to cope”, reports the state audit office.
It found that applications for residence permits take an average of one year to process. The record holder among the cases that the Supreme Audit Office (NIK) examined was one person who waited over seven years for a decision.
For the last six years running, Poland has issued the EU’s highest number of first residence permits to non-EU immigrants. The number of foreign workers registered in the social insurance system has risen from under 200,000 in 2015 to over 1.1 million at the start of this year.
“Such a large-scale phenomenon constitutes a challenge” for the administrative offices in each of Poland’s 16 provinces that are charged with registering foreign residents, notes NIK. The large-scale arrival since 2022 of Ukrainian refugees has exacerbated such problems, it adds.
NIK examined 231 cases of the handling of foreigners’ affairs at five such provincial offices. It found irregularities in 60% of the cases, primarily relating to the excessive length of proceedings.
“Numerous cases of failures to take action or unjustified breaks in proceedings were found,” said the auditors. “The length of proceedings was sometimes shocking.”
In Silesia province, the average time to resolve foreigners’ residence applications reached 381 days in 2021. That office was also “the inglorious record holder, where it took officials nearly seven years and five months to consider one foreigner’s application for temporary residence”, wrote NIK.
The audit office noted that such long waiting times create uncertainty both for the foreigners subjected to them – who, for example, cannot leave Poland to visit family abroad while waiting to obtain a permit – and for the state. It also makes it harder for employers to hire and retain foreign workers.
Skontrolowane urzędy nie zapewniły w pełni prawidłowej, sprawnej i rzetelnej obsługi obywateli polskich i cudzoziemców. Przewlekłość postępowań była czasem rażąca – jeden z cudzoziemców czekał na rozpatrzenie wniosku pobytowego ponad 7 lat:https://t.co/xlw9650ygq pic.twitter.com/mcqn718V99
— Najwyższa Izba Kontroli (NIK) (@NIKgovPL) March 19, 2024
By contrast, when NIK simultaneously conducted an audit of the same provincial offices’ handling of applications for Polish passports, it found that in only one case out of 120 examined was the document not issued in a timely and correct manner.
The auditors noted that the problems with processing foreigners’ applications came despite the offices in question significantly increasing their staffing levels. Between 2018 and 2023, for example, Silesia increased the number of staff dealing with foreigners’ affairs by almost 150%.
Yet those rises were well outpaced by the growing number of applications. In 2018, there were an average of 249 residence applications per employee in Silesia, a figure that rose to 350 in 2023. In Łódź and Subcarpathia provinces, the rises were even bigger, with staff workloads more than doubling.
In its conclusions, NIK recommended that provincial offices ensure adequate staffing to meet the increased demand for processing foreigners’ applications.
Poland needs two million new foreign workers over the next decade to counteract the ageing of its population, says the state social insurance agency.
It notes that recent years have seen mass immigration, with over a million foreign workers now registered https://t.co/LW5278uawm
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) July 12, 2023
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Main image credit: Jakub Orzechowski / Agencja Wyborcza.pl
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
