Employment permit services of the TE Office transferred to the Finnish Immigration Service on 1 January 2025

The change is part of the overall reform of TE Services, which involves transferring employment and economic development services from the central government to the municipalities’ employment areas on 1 January 2025. At the same time, matters concerning residence permits for employed persons that were previously the responsibility of the TE Office will be transferred to the Finnish Immigration Service.

– Until now, the processing of residence permit applications for employed persons and residence permit applications for seasonal work lasting more than six months has been carried out in two phases. First, the TE Office has made a partial decision, after which the processing has been transferred to us. In the future, the partial decision feature will be removed, and we will be responsible for processing these permits as a whole, explains Tuuli Huhtilainen, Process Owner.

As a result of the change, several new tasks will be transferred to the Finnish Immigration Service.

– In the future, the Finnish Immigration Service will be responsible for the discretion related to the partial decision-making phase, which includes the assessment of the terms of employment, the inspection of employer obligations, the consideration of income and labour market testing, Huhtilainen says.

Labour market testing is used to examine whether there are suitable employees available for an employer’s vacancy on the Finnish or EU and EEA labour market within a reasonable time. If suitable workforce is available, there are no grounds for the issuing of a residence permit for an employed person.

In addition, the Finnish Immigration Service will process employee announcements on employees hired from outside the EU and EEA countries.

– Employers are obliged to report a foreign national they have hired who already has a valid residence permit and right to work. However, the announcement obligation does not apply to hiring EU citizens or their family members, Huhtilainen says.

Employee announcements are submitted in the Enter Finland service. TE Offices will be responsible for their processing until the end of the year and the responsibility will transfer to the Finnish Immigration Service at the start of next year.

– The employer can speed up the processing of application matters by using Enter Finland. The service allows you to smoothly provide supplementary documents, information about the fulfilment of the terms of employment, monitor the processing of the application and notify of a new employee hired from outside the EU or EEA. We provide employers with advice on employee permits on our website, by telephone and by email. We want to further develop the services for employers, which is why we will also have customer coordinators who offer advice to employers who employ a lot of people, Huhtilainen explains.

The aim is to improve the customer experience and ensure smoother processing

Centralising residence permit matters for employees to the Finnish Immigration Service will clarify the processing of applications.

– In the future, applications will only be processed by one authority, the Finnish Immigration Service. There will be no change to the information and attachments required for the application. This will considerably streamline the processing of the application, Huhtilainen says.

Employees transferring from the TE Office and already in the agency will be introduced to new processing methods and tasks at the beginning of the year. The reform also requires extensive system and automation development.

– As a result, the processing of applications may temporarily slow down for a while at the beginning of 2025. There will also be a short break in decision-making between 1 and 8 January 2025 due to an update of Enter Finland and automated systems. The expected processing time for a positive decision will be two months at the beginning of the year, but we will quickly restore it to the target level of one month. The following year the processing will become considerably smoother and the customer experience will improve, as the customer no longer needs to deal with several different authorities in connection with their permit matter, Huhtilainen explains.

Further information for the media

• website: TE services reform 2024 - Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment