Foreign citizens will now have a single place they can visit to obtain tax, social security and health system user numbers.
Minister of Youth and Modernisation, Margarida Balseiro Lopes announced this new measure, at the end of a meeting of the first Council of Ministers at the Faculty of Science and Technology of Universidade Nova, in Almada earlier this week.
Among the 15 new measures approved at the meeting, the minister highlighted the recent issues with foreign citizens trying to obtain identification numbers for the tax, social security and national health systems.
"We know that the Finanças, Social Security offices and Citizen's Shops, have been faced with long queues" and "we have thousands of foreign citizens living in Portugal who are unable to access something as basic as a Tax Identification Number (NIF), a Social Security Number (NISS) or a Health System Number (SNS Utente) ", she said. Therefore, "what we are going to do now in 2024 is have a single place the citizen will have access to the three identification numbers, in the Citizen Spaces - this is a measure for this year, in the last quarter of 2024", explained Margarida Balseiro Lopes.
"We will make this service available in Citizen Space of each town (Espaço Cidadão)", explained the minister.
The project is being implemented by AMA (Agency for Administrative Modernization) and AIMA (Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum), and is expected to ease the workload of the people who work in the current entities that issue these numbers.
Source https://www.lusa.pt/
