Long story short, I’m a contract freelancer with ADHD. I’m on a 5 year visa until January 2024, which will mark 10 years in Japan for me.
Due simply to my poor organizational skills, I would occasionally miss the deadlines for paying my taxes/insurance/pension from 2019 to early 2022, stupidly not realizing that this could affect both Visa renewal and permanent residency applications. Yes, I know this was stupid.
Last year, I paid all my pension/taxes/insurance up front to avoid this issue, and I plan to do the same this year (and all the years going forward.) My next Visa renewal is in January 2024. I have two questions.
1) If I’ve been timely for 20 months at the time of renewal, will my late payments still affect my visa renewal? I’ve never used a lawyer for visa renewal stuff, but should I next year just to be safe?
2) I see that I need to provide tax/insurance/pension documentation for 5 years to apply for permanent residency. Do I need to wait until I have 5 years of timely payments? Or can I get away with less (ie- two years)
If anybody has any insight, I’d be very grateful!
8 comments
I just got my visa renewed with late payments. They even gave me 5 years lol
Visa – No
PR – Yes
Depending on how you apply for PR, even a spouses late payments can affect your application. It’s still with it to try applying for PR anyway after the initial visa renewal assuming another 3 or 5 years is granted.
Visa renewal should be fine as long as you meet all the other requirements.
I wonder if they’ll give the visa renewal the same treatment they gave PR in the near future. Make it so you need to be paying all your shit to get renewed
1. Regarding visa status extension, late tax payments are a bad look but depending on your employer’s category (from the point of immigration) and your municipality’s tax record format it might not be a factor. Pension and insurance are unlikely to become an issue for extension applications as they are not a typical required document for the application, and I think its pretty unlikely that documents for these would be requested.
2. For PR, its a different story. Unless you are under the HSP 1 year fast track, immigration ostensibly looks at the past 2 years of your pension and health insurance history. when I was still heavily involved in Japanese immigration work, I saw a pretty startlingly high rate of denials on this point for people who were late even once in the past 2 years (or whose spouse was late!). Its worth mentioning that the way the pension record system works, immigration will probably see your entire pension record since you were 20. It is yet to be seen whether this makes any difference, since I’ve had a few clients who had over a year of pension noncompliance on their record (but over 2 years prior) submitted to immigration who were granted PR without much issue
I have the PR and I’m sure I was late with payments hella times. As long as it’s paid in the end I do t think it’s a big deal. Just stay up to date, don’t break the law, and go through a lawyer if you are worried (I did and got the PR first try) and you should be ok. Remember though, you need 10 full years here, so you apply in your 11th year, at least that is what I was told/did. Talk to your local immigrations office of worried. Good luck!
I just received PR at the beginning of January. When I submitted my application in the middle of July 2022, I could only prove two years worth of on-time resident tax payments. Irresponsibly, prior to that, I hadn’t paid my residence tax on time on more than one occasion. As for health and pension, I had three years of on-time payment. I used an immigration scrivener. When I originally expressed interest in applying the year before last and told the scrivener that I only had one year of on-time resident tax payment at that time, she told me two wait one more year as two years’ of on-time resident tax payment was necessary.
Use a goddamn calendar with reminders. Immigration isn’t going to care about your ADHD.