Apostille Korea handles the issuing of overseas criminal record certificates Procedures and processing times differ by country, as with the FBI Check in the United States and the RCMP certificate in Canada, and a missing document means starting the whole preparation again.

Apostille Korea said it provides an agency service for obtaining criminal record certificates issued abroad. The company said that as overseas employment, emigration and international marriage have become common, requests for criminal record certificates from individual countries have risen with them. Because the issuing procedure differs from country to country, applicants who handle it alone often lose time to trial and error.

Overseas criminal record certificates differ from country to country

As employment with overseas companies, emigration and international marriage have become ordinary, more people are asked to produce criminal record certificates from individual countries. Known also as background check documents, these include the FBI Check in the United States, the RCMP certificate in Canada, the NBI Clearance and the COC, and the criminal record certificate required in China is a document of the same kind. Someone who has lived in a country for a period on a residence visa is asked to submit one when applying elsewhere for a visa, permanent residency, emigration, employment or study. The difficulty is that the issuing procedure, the processing time, the point at which an application can be filed and the governing rules all vary by country. Proceeding without an accurate grasp of the requirements means spending time and money repeatedly, and the burden weighs most heavily on those living abroad.

From issuance through to legalisation

Obtaining a criminal record certificate abroad requires completing fingerprint forms and an application, a stage that calls for certification by the relevant national authority. Beyond that, some documents can only be used after passing in turn through notarisation, apostille certification and consular legalisation. Working through all of these steps in a place where the language, the culture and the administrative process are unfamiliar is a burden for most applicants. If a required document is missing or does not match the stated purpose, the application is refused, and the papers already submitted cannot be recovered, so the preparation must begin again from the start. Apostille Korea said that because this document counts as the most sensitive category of personal data in every country and the issuing process is complex, it is safer to work through a specialist office familiar with the procedure.

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Source: 폴리뉴스 · 2017-04-26