‘Gov’t seeks to improve services offered to expatriates’

DEAD SEA — The government on Wednesday reiterated its keenness on developing the quality of services provided to Jordanians living abroad.

Speaking at a Jordanian Expatriates Conference 2015 session, Foreign Ministry Secretary General Mohammad Tayseer Bani Yassin said the ministry and its embassies seek to provide the best services to Jordanians living abroad.

“However, in countries with large Jordanian communities, the pressure and large number of processes tends to cause some delays,” he said, citing Saudi Arabia, which hosts some 400,000 Jordanians, as an example.

The ministry’s central operations management works round-the-clock and on official holidays in order to have the required documents ready as quickly as possible, Bani Yassin said.

Meanwhile, Waleed Abida, a governor at the Interior Ministry, said the ministry seeks to develop an electronic system to facilitate issuing and renewing documents for expatriates online, instead of the current methods that include regular mail, e-mail and fax.

He cited some 14 services that the ministry provides for expatriates, highlighting plans to reduce the duration of processes and to eliminate unnecessary procedures.

“We also seek to familiarise expatriates with the needed duration to process their documents, as well as the fees and the documents they need to bring along to avoid further delays,” Abida said.  

With some 3 million requests processed annually, including 750,000 passports and 800,000 identification cards, the Civil Status and Passports Department also aims to facilitate the renewal and issuance of documents for Jordanians abroad, the department’s director general, Marwan Qteishat, said at the session.

Facilitations include authorising relatives of the concerned expatriate to apply for and receive some documents.  

For her part, Yasera Ghosheh, the King Abdullah II Centre for Excellence executive director, said the centre offers three excellence awards, including one allocated for excellence among public service providers.

“The awards aim to spread the culture of excellence in government services and improve them,” she said, adding that the evaluation criteria, include the level of the service, communication with the audience and achieving results of the service.

In 2013, five of the 31 institutions applying for the award received two and three out of five in the excellence ranking, while the number increased in 2015 to 21 out of 46 applicants.   

In a general overview of several public bodies, Ghosheh said citizens’ feedback showed they have no problem with paying fees for processing their requests, but they have an issue with the vague duration of processing and the lack of commitment to it, when available.