red tape

Last year the regulations concerning the renewal of the E2 visa here in Korea were changed, requiring updated versions of your health certificate and your police clearance. However, from a lot of enquiries, the information I got was that it would only be needed if you are getting a completely new visa - in other words, when you leave, then apply for a new job.

As it happened, we only took along the contract and letters from our schools, and we got the visas renewed for 2008/2009 February.

However, this year, when we went with exactly the same situation as last year - i.e. we are both staying at the same school, we were told that we do need the documents.

As you can imagine, getting the police clearance is the main problem - the whole getting fingerprints taken here, courier to SA and still waiting for the certificates to return!

Upon returning from the immigration department, where we got another extension until we get the certificates, we were talking about the strangeness of how there is really no reason that this process should be so cumbersome in this day and age of information technology.

What prevents countries from putting together databases on their population where things like criminal convictions, tax evasion and other problems are noted along with their ID number? And then opening that database for queries from other countries?

So that, when someone in SA wants to issue a British citizen with a visa, they could simply call up his or her ID number and either see an all clear, or a problem and deny it then and there.

Now I know there are the fears of invasion of privacy and unwarranted entries, as well as stolen identity - my point is that all of us already have an enormous amount of data entered into a myriad of databases. All I'm saying is that I cannot see why the existing information cannot be centralised and used to check on a person.

Or is my utopian fantasy kicking in?