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Rob Mar

Administrator – Expert al grupului+1

“I echo the answers you received from Kas Ken-Mcd and Marta Koscielniak: your friend should have applied for status and waited for the decision from his country of origin (Romania, I assume), not come to the UK on the basis of a submitted application (or, worse, come here as a visitor, lying at the border about his travel intentions, only to apply under the EUSS). The very fact that he was refused at least once (something tells me it may have been more than once) and still continued to live and work in the UK brings him to this particular situation he faced at the border.

This is by no means a new situation, as Kas and Marta have both told you: it has been like this since the beginning. Because the COA has been phrased in a generic way, to encompass all applicants (own-eligibility applicants and joining family members), there was a lot of confusion about the rights JFMs might have in the UK. Add to this the confusion brought on by the 90-day visitor exemption (which was then enshrined in law), which allowed visitors to apply from the UK, AND the fact that the Employer Checking System provided no motivation or recourse for employers to check the validity of one’s EUSS application (but instead only limited the checks to asking for a share code… which, until last year, could be obtained by anyone with a passport)… and a lot (sorry: A LOT) of abuse of the system has been taking place.

To provide some perspective: out of 40-50,000 new applications the EUSS still receives every month about 20,000 are PSS-SS switching applications, and the rest are new PSS applications: about 10,000 of them are from joining family members (or newborns) who actually have some merit in applying, and the remainder (10,000-15,000) are pure and simple attempts to defraud the immigration system. I am not saying your friend falls in this last category, I am simply telling you why the system is finally properly cracking down on this kind of fraud.

Which brings me to this comment: while the JFM COA provisions aren’t new, what is new is the fact that over the last months of the old government (and so far in the first month of the new government) there have been significant efforts to crack down on those who work in the UK “from COA to COA”, most of them people who know they don’t qualify for status under the EUSS and simply submit successive fraudulent applications (and most of these applications based on sponsors who aren’t qualified/relevant to the EUSS). Again: not saying this is your friend’s case, but…….statistically speaking it may be him too.

And this crackdown YES can involve seizing ill-gotten gains. Because working in the UK on the basis of a Certificate of Application (and Share Code thus obtained) of a fraudulent application IS WORKING ILLEGALLY. Therefore any income so gained, regardless of it having been properly taxed or not, IS ILL-GOTTEN. So what the agent told him IS CORRECT: he very much risks having his money seized. Such a crackdown may even involve curtailing the status of the sponsor (which, I would advise him, is far worse than having £5,000-10,000 confiscated), and may even involve cracking down on employers and landlords associated with the presence of that particular applicant in the UK.

So: while I am sorry your friend is now too scared to come back, and that his girlfriend may have to face going through childbirth alone, this is entirely a mess of their own making. As my colleague told you privately as well, we welcome your friend reaching out to us directly, via DM, to be offered further guidance (starting with looking into why his latest application has been pending for so long). Of course, won’t hold my breath he will actually do so, because I assume he knows what we do in our day jobs, and if he’s afraid after one interaction with a Border Force agent he might not want to expose himself further… but the invitation to try to guide him is still there, and I encourage him to take it.

One thing he should not do, though, even if his relationship with his girlfriend qualifies under the EUSS, is return to the UK to continue to work until the decision on his latest application has been made.”