After reading this thread I want to mention some more info in case it’s helpful:
- My mom has passed away already, so that’s why I didn’t need a 授權書 but I needed to prove that she passed away and our child-parent relationship (which was required for the passport application already that I did last year)
- My mom never lost her Taiwan nationality, so that part of my case is a little different.
- I am over 20 years old (33).
- I never previously had a household registration in Taiwan (I believe the process is different if you did).
- Definitely be careful about military conscription laws if you later plan to apply for your own household registration and ID card later, and such conscription would create serious problems (keep in mind that I believe avoiding conscription is against the law so also be careful about telling everyone you have a planned intent to avoid conscription if you’re required to do it). That’s another topic that has a ton of conflicting info on the internet, which I think is specific to peoples’ specific cases (i.e. their year born) and it’s important to be careful about confirming information.
- I think we as a community should think about the laws and application directions not in terms of specific documents you need to provide. We should think about them as “things you need to prove.” Because there are so many different possible things you might need to provide, it would be very difficult to list every combination possible. For example, as I mentioned above, if your parent(s) are deceased, the process and documents to provide are different. Another example: some people assume when you prove your parents’ marriage at the time of your birth, you need to provide a marriage certificate from another country, but in my case my parents were married in Taiwan so the original (i.e. issued by the office directly and not a photocopy) printout of the 戶籍謄本 where the marriage was recorded was sufficient. Therefore, the government would need to provide a very very complex additional set of directions to cover all possible cases and all possible documents. I’m not saying they shouldn’t in theory, but governments are created by humans and bound by rules and process, so they may not behave the way we would ideally want them to. Unfortunately, this makes it very difficult for the government employee at TECO or even entry level workers at the NIA to resolve complex cases like this, and I think this may contribute to the cases where they provide conflicting information.