Everything you wrote here is technically correct, but some important things to note:
Per the question:
Does the 1 year continuous stay start when I first enter Taiwan or when the TARC is issued?
And this answer:
Q5: Tiff Ting says “The date your residency begins is the day the immigration office approves your application, not the date you land in Taiwan or when you submit your application.”
That’s the date of the residency on the TARC itself, but that won’t be relevant in many cases. Three prominent examples:
- Number of days in calendar year physically residing in Taiwan, if you want to apply for your 身分證
- Number of days in calendar year physically residing in Taiwan for calculating local tax obligations
- Number of days residing in Taiwan before you can apply for National Health Insurance and 健保卡
So for example, you can’t get your TARC on Jan. 1 in another country (let’s say the U.S.), and then fly to Taiwan on August 1 and expect to be approved for National Health Insurance on day 1 physically in Taiwan (though it was possible many years ago, the rule was revised many years ago as well).
So, when we read “the date your residency begins,” we should be careful about what that actually implies and what rights you get from it (very little in my experience, other than your TARC expiration date starts counting down from that issuance date).
I will also add that the health check is easier to do in Taiwan simply because they have a standard process for it with standard departments that specialize in it at most/many major hospitals in Taiwan, because it’s a health checked that is used for many purposes, such as for foreign workers, etc. In the U.S. it’s a little awkward to tell them, “I need the signature of the person who runs this entire hospital system.” In Taiwan, that’s just a stamp that a clerk can press onto the papers.
As for restoring HHR, I’m not sure what that process is like, unfortunately. However, it’s important to note that you may not even need to do that if your parents had active HHR at the time that you were born. For more on this, you can read the whole ordeal that Lain and I went through here: Reasons for NWOHR getting TARC - #15 by multipass
Lain confirmed that his Taiwan parent had a cancelled HHR but it was active at the time Lain was born, if I remember correctly, and NIA ultimately accepted that after we explored the option of getting lawmakers to explain the purpose of the particular laws to NIA. Hopefully that might spare you some pain @pull_forward , depending on your situation. If so, you can thank Lain for having gone through that whole painful ordeal 