Applications for Citizen Digital Certificates (自然人憑證) were opened to foreign residents for the first time yesterday, paving the way for foreigners to apply for a range of government services online rather than in person.
More than 5 million cards have been issued since 2003, but foreign residents were previously barred from applying.
“Today we are opening applications to allow foreign residents to apply,” National Immigration Agency (NIA) information department head Shih Ming-te (施明德) said. “Foreigners will be able to immediately use the card to apply for entry and exit documents, with other functions to be added gradually.”
The National Health Insurance Administration and the Bureau of Labor Insurance are in the process of updating their systems to allow foreign residents to use the cards to look up information filed with the government, Shih said.
There are also plans to allow foreign university professors to use the cards to submit applications to apply for government subsidies, he said.
The additional functions are scheduled to come online by the end of June, he said.
“People care most about paying taxes, but it is already too late this year,” he said, adding that foreign residents should be able to use the cards to pay taxes starting next year.
Shih said the NIA would consider whether to integrate the card’s functions into a new generation of Alien Resident Cards (ARC) after the introduction of the new national ID card with integrated functions next year.
Foreign holders of ARCs embedded with advanced anti-forgery microchips can apply for the citizen digital certificates at NIA offices. Holders of short-term, temporary paper ARCs are excluded.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching