Securing Relevant Documents for Visa Application

Normally getting documents will not be too much of a hassle - however if we consider the fact that we lived in Singapore at the time of application and we graduated almost a decade ago, it made things a bit more complicated.

Amongst the documents that were required, some of them were already with us. The others need to be requested and took a few weeks to be secured.

The below summarizes the documents that we needed for our skilled migrant visa application:

1. Birth certificate
2. Marriage certificate
3. Transcript of record from university attended
4. Diploma
5. Syllabus of the subjects taken during university
6. CPA Philippines certificate of good standing
7. Detailed certificate of employment (COE)

It took us a while to be able to secure item # 5; the university where Babes graduated from did not have a good system of archiving documents hence it took around a month to dig up past documents and collate them all together. Nonetheless, we managed to secure a 99-page syllabus at the start of August 2012.

Item # 7 was another problem we encountered. CPA Australia and DIAC needs a detailed COE wherein it would stipulate your roles and responsibilities from the company. The problem was for company # 2 that Babes worked previously, the HR of the said firm does not issue a COE that indicated the roles and responsibilities.  We tried to contact previous bosses from her firm but none were able to help unfortunately. Left with no option, we decided to execute a statutory declaration that was signed by Babes in which it stated her roles and responsibilities in Company X. It was also indicated in the statutory declaration the reason why she wasn’t able to secure a detailed COE from the company itself.

Once we had all these documents at hand, we had it certified as true copy (CTC) in a local lawyer in Singapore. The CTC’ed copy was then scanned as a PDF.

As mentioned, it was a tough task to secure all these but we are very much thankful to our families for assisting us in getting these documents; without such, we won’t be able to proceed in our skilled migrant visa application.