Post
by faliyevvhv » Wed Sep 23, 2020 3:10 pm
Hi all,
It is my first time post on this forum. I'm also interested in knowing whether the queue is based on the date passports/IRP card received by INIS or by the time of application. My case is rather complicated. Me and my wife hold Stamp 4 since February 2015 (5+ years) under the HPSU (Startup Entrepreneur) Visa. I applied for renewal on June to the Startup and Investment department of INIS and they postponed the review of the documents until July 20th and they sent a refusal letter for renewal under the SUEP (Startup Entrepreneur programme) saying that they had a requirement that the company should have made €1 million+ sales and have 10 employees in Ireland in the 5th year. In fact, these are the definition of HPSU (High-Potential Startup), but this isn't the requirement. SUEP guidelines clearly mentions the renewal requirements which are all about being not burden in the state and not having criminal activity etc. The fact is that my business has made €3.5 million in the 5th year (3.5 times more than what they mentioned in the letter), but as it is a common practice for IT related companies, I don't have all the employees in Ireland, I have many full time contractors in other countries. So, the company doesn't have 10 employees in Ireland. All in all, they refused to renew and asked me to apply for long-term residence which normally takes 6-8 months in normal times (not even COVID times). After long correspondence with the Startup Unit, their representative (don't want to call her name) mistakenly forwarded their own internal correspondence to me and I noticed that after reading our financial documents SOMEHOW she concluded that my company just paid €8 in the last 5 years. I don't know how she read the documents and how it is even possible to pay just €8 tax over 5 years. Anyways, I showed them their mistake and explained that in fact we paid €205,000 tax, not €8 with proofs. Only after that, 36 days after the first refusal, they corrected their mistake and sent a grant letter for the permission of additional 5 years.
So, here is what makes it complicated. We have Irish citizen child and because of the above delay we applied for change of status from SUEP stamp 4 to Irish citizen child stamp 4 via online renewal on August 10. INIS received our documents/passports on 11th August. Then when we got a grant letter from Startup unit on 26th, they told me that I should apply online again and they will inform the Registration department and they will cancel our first application which was on August 10 and revert it to the new one. So, we applied again paying additional €600 (for me and my wife) on 27th. We didn't send any document this time, because we sent them on 11th. Later SUEP confirmed that they reverted the first application to the second one. I asked them 100s of times to somehow accelerate the process because I have to travel ASAP for business, but they said they cannot do anything. Also, they didn't take the 36 days lost into consideration which was wasted due to their mistake.
Anyways, I'd be very happy if someone in a similar case or with a similar experience could reply when should I expect the passports back in my case. Also, whether it is counted from the day they received the passports or not? I'm very desperate, because I can't attend important business meetings and it really harms my business, which contributes so much to the Irish economy.
