do you actually have one? are you setting up one?
cause I don’t have one atm but would like to register once I get there
Hence “in the process of registration”
Looks like they’ve extended the “halt” on processing visas until 1/10 lol. I am kind of approaching a crossroads so if they extend again I might have to decide whether I want to use some kind of urgent justification or not.
I’ve progrrssed up to the “consulting with X department” stage , and have been stuck there for a while.
I’m hoping it’s just due to the holidays.
What would you say my chances are from here? Are the hard parts behind or ahead.
I think you should just give them whatever justification you have. Mine was I want to get my kids in school before the spring semester starts, and they approved all 5 of my dependents.
Thanks. The tricky part is that we aren’t moving to Taiwan until July. So in addition to losing out on half a year of gold card validity, there’s also the oddity of me using some excuse for urgency and then not even going until July lol.
My dilemma is that from Feb until mid-May it will be difficult for me to complete the passport submission due to travel locations. If I could just wait until May that would be ideal but they’ve also supposedly instituted a 30-day maximum for completing the passport submission after conditional approval, which will go into effect once the halt is over.
How long did it take for NIA to review your application?
My status changed yesterday to “Review by National Immigration Agency” (Didn’t get an email stating that it changed. I happened to log on to the portal.)
Did you bring your own tests or are the extra 3 steps provided?
The resident authorization letter was approved 4 days after visiting the TECO for passport inspection (but it might be more correct to say that it was approved 5 minutes after I called the NIA to say that I had my flight soon). The Gold Card itself was finalized 3 days later. Is this what you were asking? Not sure if I misunderstood.
You get 4 rapid antigen self-tests for free when you arrive at the airport, as the second-to-last step before leaving the building. You do those in quarantine and just tell your health police officer the result (over LINE, in my case).
You must have some hookups, or I must have some bad luck.
I picked up my passport after verification on December 3rd. It took over 3 weeks to go from the Passport Inspection stage to get to the NIA stage. It’s in the NIA stage now for review. I’m hoping that NIA will approve before CNY.
Maybe just a mix of urgency and desperation 
Anyway, good luck and I hope it works out soon. From the looks of it, coming here after CNY might be the most reasonable anyway, to avoid the whole quarantine chaos (I’m pretty sure I’m paying an incredible 3000NTD/night for a room that would normally be no more than 500, and this is in a city 3 hours south of Taipei… it was the only place left so I’m grateful I could even get this, and there’s a guy from Taiyuan quarantining here also, because it was the only place he could find too).
NIA works fast!!! I woke up this morning with in email from NIA notifying that my GC was approved!! I checked the application portal website and the Authorization Certificate is available to download.
The government 7+7 is from time to time open. Then you pay 1500 only plus can change to your own place after. Be prepared to get overcharged on anything suitable for quarantine though (access for food delivery up to apartment door and landlord willing to rent it out for a month).
Still the much better deal that way - well let’s see how the government quarantine hotel looks like, that’s a random
Congrats.
My application has been stuck at “Consulting with Ministry of Science and Technology” for almost 2 weeks. Anyone else experience this?
In my case, this was the longest step and took 3-4 weeks. The others were pretty quick.
First and foremost, let me just show you what we just received:
We could not have gotten to this point without Yixian (Profile - yixianosaurus - Forumosa). My wife and I applied for the Gold Card back in May 2021. We received our passport verification notification in July 2021. We are located in San Francisco and have just been waiting for our local TECO office to open up so that we can submit our passports. Obviously, the office being closed is something that Yixian could not control. However, she continued to be our advocate. She kept us up-to-date with the current regulations in Taiwan and gave us insight with the on-the-ground COVID situation in Taiwan. She made phone calls on our behalf in Taiwan and also in the US. We hired Yixian in late April 2021. Before we hired her, we chatted with her via video conference and she described her qualifications and her experience. She is not a immigration lawyer and was a former language teacher. She has been consulting for a few years now helping people obtain their Gold Card. My wife and I instantly trusted her. She had allayed all our concerns about what we read on the forums about applying for the Gold Card. My wife and I are both engineers and we had read several posts about how the Taiwanese government was starting to become more stringent about accepting Gold Card applications for people with similar qualifications. Yixian told us that information was not correct. On top of this she was very professional, easy to talk to (in English) and very personable. Within a day or two after hiring her, she had sent us a questionnaire to fill out. After we filled that out, it seemed like she completed our application and submitted our paperwork right away. She also translated our recommendations, cover letter and work history letters to Mandarin. We were happy to receive our passport verification notification in 6 weeks. This was about the time the Delta variant was starting to dominate the news. Yixian warned us that the government was starting to delay the processing of Gold card applicants. We just had to wait. In the meantime, Yixian checked in with us regularly to give us an update on the current policies. At some point in November, Yixian advised us to contact the Gold Card help desk. With that guidance, we were finally able to get the exception we needed so that our passports can be verified and Yixian called the San Francisco TECO to help facilitate.
If you want to know more about the Gold Card itself, I suggest reading her post here: The Employment Gold Card Super-Thread - #2976 by yixianosaurus
I highly recommend Yixian to help with the Gold Card application process. If we hired an immigration lawyer to help us, it would have cost us much more and probably not receive such quality of service. With COVID and the constantly evolving policies, its was important to find someone that was knowledgeable, had their boots-on-the-ground and acted on your behalf. If you would like to know more, feel free to direct message me.
Congratulations!!!
Hi all, I received my gold card around last July. After that, visa processing was halted and we couldn’t apply for a dependent pass for my wife. We waited for a couple of months and things didn’t seem to change. So we ended up moving on to another country. Do I need to declare I am not coming to Taiwan under the gold card anymore? Of course, we would still very much like to live in Taiwan in future. I don’t think there is a way to postpone the validity of my goldcard right?
Just a heads-up. It seems that Kaohsiung’s Motor Vehicle Office(s) still have no idea of what a Gold Card is. They either refuse it (and require loud arguments to go through) or type it in as an APRC and get error messages from the system. It has already happened to me several times.
If you encounter difficulties in Kaohsiung or anywhere else, I would suggest you first of all not give up (they will try their best to brush you off) and keep insisting that the Gold Card is an ARC. It’s the truth (it’s written on it too: you can point at it) and it’s your right. After that, it might also help to add that it is a “regular (1-, 2- or 3-year) ARC” and “not an APRC” to prevent the counter staff from telling you that there is something wrong with your card and that you need to contact NIA.
Greetings. This is an update on my effort to obtain a Gold Card.
My application failed.
TL;DR: I applied in September 2020. After some back-and-forth, my application was formally declined in January 2022. The problem in my case is that, at the time of application, I was not aware that the requirement to have a certain salary “previously or currently” does not include any salary history that is more than 3 years old (a misunderstanding that was caused by a deficiency in the online application instructions, in my opinion).
Here are some excerpts from my previous interactions on this forum (June 2020) and my further comments.
What I did was that I followed the link cited above, which took me to a table of contents. Per further advice as above, I clicked on Economy, which took me to a page that summarized the requirements for an Economy application and also provided a link to a PDF with a more detailed specification of the requirements, which I reviewed meticulously. The PDF contained no indication that there were further requirements not specified in that document. Both the Economy summary page and the detailed PDF said that the indicated salary can be “previously or currently” without specifying the further stipulation that anything more than 3 years in the past doesn’t qualify. It turns out that this additional stipulation can be found by starting from the table of contents page as linked above, and clicking on Introduction. Since I had not read the Introduction page at the time I applied and paid for my application, I was unaware that I was submitting an application that would not qualify.
The good news is that, now that this is past, having one less option simplifies the way forward, in a sense. Thanks to all who engaged with me in the discussion, and good luck to everyone. I’m posting this because I hope others don’t make the same mistake I did.