The Perils of Contriving a Job Offer Just for the Purposes of a Hong Kong Employment Visa Application
Posted by The Visa Geeza / in Employment Visas, Hadley Says… / 17 responses
First Published November 25, 2013
Sometimes foreign nationals in Hong Kong take the view that it is acceptable to collaborate in the conjuring up of a job offer just for the purposes of helping a friend or professional colleague secure an employment visa in the HKSAR.
However, this is fraught with danger and should not be seriously considered as an acceptable way forward in pursuit of a residence visa here.
Immigration Department policy is, and always has been, that the job offer underpinning an application for an employment visa must be for a genuine vacancy.
So, if you are party to an employment visa application where the job is in fact not a genuine one, then you are at considerable risk of:
1 – Criminal prosecution for making false representations to an Immigration Officer.
2 – A negative prior immigration record for both the applicant and the sponsor.
3 – Discovery of the contrivance at the time of visa extension.
4 – Discovery on enquiry at the time of an application for the Right of Abode.
5 – Discovery during the currency of any genuine third party application for a visa by the sponsor subsequently.
Just because the Hong Kong Immigration Department deploy a flexible, non-bureaucratic employment visa application consideration process, it is churlish to expect that they do not have control mechanisms in place for fishing out suspicious applications – especially those where the job offer is not a genuine one.
So please, no matter how much you are tempted, do NOT contrive a job offer just for visa purposes.
The risks to the ersatz employer and the visa applicant him or herself are very great indeed.
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Getting a working visa for Hong Kong is just a matter of filling in the forms, right?
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The Hong Kong Visa Geeza (a.k.a Stephen Barnes) is a co-founder of the Hong Kong Visa Centre and author of the Hong Kong Visa Handbook. A law graduate of the London School of Economics, Stephen has been practicing Hong Kong immigration since 1993 and is widely acknowledged as the leading authority on business immigration matters here for the last 24 years.
ST
What do you recommend instead to show proof that an employer cannot find a local person to fill the role? When the person they want to hire is already known, available, skilled and foreign? Is this something that doesn’t need addressing until the application is underway, and the immigration department requests it? Thanks
The Visa Geeza
You need to demonstrate that genuine efforts have been made to source the talent locally BEFORE the job was offered to a foreigner. If not, then you have to carft a detailed justification why no local recruitment efforts was made and see if that works. You do this during the application itself.