“There have been difficulties in terms of IT application. The service capacity has been very limited because of this”, said Artur Jorge Girão, the president of SINSEF, the union of SEF employees.

About a month before the official closure of the Foreigners and Borders Service and the takeover of the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA), the number of pending issues continues to increase. SEF itself admits the existence of "constraints".

The computer system has been having problems for at least “two weeks”, a fact that “has had an impact on service”. Many appointments are not kept and people are forced to reschedule. “It affects everything that involves issuing residence permits. Concessions, renewals. Everything that involves printing and issuing a document is congested, limited”, says Artur Girão.

“Our computer application is already over ten years old. At a time when information technology advances every six months, perhaps it is already outdated. There has to be an investment in the future, in terms of technology, because if not, pending issues will not be recovered”, warns the union leader.

SEF confirmed to CNN Portugal the existence of "slowness in the system" and "constraints".

In the response, sent by email, SEF explains that "it implemented, in 2008, the Information and Automated Process Management System (SIGAP), to respond to a need for agility in terms of execution and control of processes, ensuring not only the information about the status of the process to the citizen, as well as its dynamic management".

However, the Service assumes that "over the years, SIGAP has undergone changes with the implementation of new functionalities necessary to fulfil SEF's functions, including consultations with other systems (internal and external), and these processes are also, often causing system slowdowns."

Without saying when the problems began, SEF guarantees that it is "mitigating the constraints, so that they have the least impact possible". And he adds that "citizens who saw their appointment cancelled due to difficulties in processing the SIGAP, were notified, by email, of the new date to go to a SEF branch".

Recently, Diário de Notícias reported that there are at least around 270,000 requests for a residence visa still to be decided. Processes that should now be transferred to the new Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum.