UAE | Government
'Complacency' marks expats' approach to ID
Numbers of professionals began to taper off after announcement regarding fines - official.
- By Binsal Abdul Kader, Staff Reporter
- Published: 23:36 December 22, 2008
Abu Dhabi: Complacency on the part of expatriate professionals and the presence of large number of Emirati children for registration at the last moment are part of the latest developments in ID card registration, a senior official of the Emirates Identity Authority (EIDA) told Gulf News on Monday.
The number of expatriate professionals who line up for ID card registration has gone down following the announcement about no fines and the granting of more time, Thamer Rashid Al Qasimi, Planning Director and Project Management Director at (EIDA) said.
"This complacency may trigger a crisis and create problems for them later similar to what happened to Emiratis," he said. "When the registration for Emiratis started in 2006, we had warned them of fines for failing to complete the registration by December 31, 2008."
"But most of them were complacent, so about 229,000 of the estimated 825,000 Emiratis were left to register by November 30, 2008", he said.
Although the latest statistics are not available, many of them (around 229,000) will end up paying a fine of Dh1000 from January 1, 2009 onwards, pointed out the official.
"Many of the Emiratis who already registered had not taken their children with them although EIDA announced several times that registration was mandatory for children although ID card was optional," said Al Qasimi.
Now large numbers of Emiratis are showing up again with their children to avoid the fines after December 31 deadline, he said.
"About 493,000 of the estimated 600,000 expatriate professionals (by November 30, 2008) are left to register before February 28, 2009 but very few of them turn up these days."
Their number started to taper off just after the announcement on November 19 in Gulf News that no fines will be imposed on expatriate professionals even after December 31 deadline, said the official.
EIDA said that no fines will be imposed on expatriates until December 31, 2010, the deadline set by the federal law for all expatriates. A time frame for each category of expatriates was set by EIDA as authorised by the law to ensure smooth registration.
He cautioned that even if there are no fines, the ID card is the official identification document of expatriate professionals from January 1, 2009, and if any official body demands it for any transactions, EIDA will not be responsible.
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