After weeks of fact-finding and agonizing time spent waiting, my Thai Police Certificate finally arrived as part of documents needed for our application for Canadian PR.
Grace and I had a bet on which country’s police certificate would be completed first. Taiwan won, hands down. It was done within days (having every bit of information online didn’t hurt).
Naturally, the bet came down to between Thailand and Malaysia.
Thailand didn’t provide much online. But at least a form was available with some instructions from a Thai Embassy in Canada. Armed with that information, Grace still had to call a couple of Thai Embassies in the States to really get the nuts and bolts of the process down.
The same couuldn’t be said about Malaysia, however. The only available information I found was from an Australian Embassy where Malaysia has special diplomatic relations with, hence the instructions were useless. And when Grace called the Malaysian Embassy in L.A., they bounced her between different departments before someone was able to give her something informative. And the person even gave her a tip: “It’d take 3-6 months to process”. The person hinted that it’d be safer to bet on the “SIX” month side of the timeline. And that was back in March.
To be fair, Thai Embassy wasn’t much better. Grace had to call three different embassies just to get everything (L.A. branch bounced calls to automated machine; NYC branch simply defers responsibility to other branches; Chicago branch was the only decent one with a very nice staff). And when she finally talked to someone, instead of a lame “three to six months” guarantee that the Malaysian Embassy provided, the Thai Embassy basically said “it’ll be done when it’s done” without any specific timeline. However, the nice lady on the phone did stress that the process would be “a lot” faster if someone in Thailand were to follow-up physically; my mom came to mind immediately. I also had to get finger printed (for the first time in my life), not one sheet, but THREE sheets of original finger prints.
Taiwan has its issues; efficiency certainly is not one of them. The push of its e-government, where almost every bit of information a citizen would need to make his/her life easier is onilne, has been a very successful one. I can’t even attest to that kind of efficiency about government agencies in Silicon Valley, where the dot-com boom was supposed to have revamped how the government operates.
So efficiency test results: Taiwan one — Thailand/Malaysia: zero.